[smufl-discuss] Re: How should a notation program handle the extra JSON files?

[dspreadbury]

Abraham wrote:

> 1. Why are the glyph names (in the font file) more like the unicode
point
> and not the human-friendly names? Switching to the human-friendly names
> would eliminate the need for "glyphnames.json", no?

It would, but it would be in contradiction to Adobe's guidelines for the
naming of glyphs in new fonts. Their recommendations are to use glyph
names of the form "uniXXXX" or "uXXXX" for glyphs that are not explicitly
listed in the Adobe Glyph List for New Fonts (AGLFN). This helps with the
encoding of text in PDF files, where the mapping back from a glyph in a
PDF to the correct code point is an issue (e.g. when trying to copy and
paste text .

This issue is alluded to in this Adobe presentation:

https://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/files/typblography/typotechnica2007/Glyph%20names.pdf

You can read the specification for the Adobe Glyph List (AGL) on GitHub
here:

https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-specification

The AGLFN is found here:

https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-aglfn

So, in summary, SMuFL follows Adobe's AGLFN recommendations for glyph
naming to ensure maximal compatibility with PDF workflows. As such, the
glyph name cannot be the glyph name as defined in glyphnames.json.

> As a matter of
> documentation, it's a nice file to have, but as a matter of usage, it
seems
> more efficient to call it by a known name rather than relying on a
mapping
> function. For those of you who are using SMuFL fonts in your
application,
> what do you do?

What we do in our application, for example, is create a C++ header file
from the glyphnames.json, mapping each code point to a constant value in
an enum so that SMuFL glyphs can be referred to by their constants from
the rest of the application.

> 2. What is the recommendation for storing/using all the JSON files? Is
there
> a specific directory that these are placed in so the notation program
knows
> where to find them? Supposing a system has more than one notation
program
> that can use SMuFL fonts, should there be a single location that they
all
> can refer to?

There isn't at present a recommended location for the SMuFL JSON files; as
of this most recent update to SMuFL, there now is a recommendation for
where font-specific metadata files should be located, of course.

I would suggest that an application should include the SMuFL JSON files
for the version of SMuFL it supports in some application-private location,
so that it is isolated from any unexpected changes in a later version of
the standard.

Daniel

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