🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, unless I've grossly misunderstood the arguments so
far, we have two different ways of encoding a document.

1. Unicode. This would be a systems for language 
   transport, and has no utility for fonts.

2. Encoding each glyph with font file name and char. position.
     Avast  (Swash A, st lig, italic, Adobe Garamond) becomes

	AGaramondAlt-Italic 65   (swash A)
	AGaramond-Italic    118  (ascii v)
	AGaramond-Italic    97   (ascii a)
	AGaramodAlt-Italic  115  (ascii s, st lig) in this font

The same word in Utopia, caps and small caps, becomes

	Utopia-Regular		65 (ascii A)
	UtopiaExp-Regular	118
	UtopiaExp-Regular	97
	UtopiaExp-Regular	115
	UtopiaExp-Regular	116

Of course, often whole pages would go past without a font change,
so a character could inherit its font.

If you receive a font in this format, it would be very
difficult to decompose it back to an editable form. The
editor-tool has to know that AGaramodAlt-Italic  115
is an s and a t (in Unicode, or whatever). 

In a recent work, I had section heads set like my first
example (I've taught my copy of TeX to replace the caps
in my AGaramond-Italic with swash caps if I ask it to), but
in one head, the swash A forced the letters too far apart, so
I used a normal Italic A in that spot. If the editor
assumed "heads are in swash, so I'll decompose them now
and recompose when it's time to print," then I'd have
that Swash A back, and the st and ct ligs might
show up as well.

Clearly a system for dealing with font encoding hasn't
even gleamed on the horizon yet. For every glyph in 
a typeset document, we'll need to know

1. The E-Font name.
2. The position in the E-Font.
3. The Unicode character or characters, if any,
	corresponding to that glyph.

I assume that dingbats aren't in Unicode? :)

An E-Font, for this purpose, is related to the old
definition of a font ("A typeface at a certain size.")
An E-Font would be, for example:
	PS-AdobeFont-1.0: CastellarMT 001.000
as taken from the font file.

We'll still have to ship tables containing #3 above with
each document, since without knowing the Unicodes, there
may not be a way to change the font to one you have, if
needed. These could be reduced in size if we made
some encodings required knowledge. ASCII, certainly
(either A-Za-z0-9, or full), perhaps Adobe Standard,
maybe a few others.

OK, so what do we do now? I'd guess QuickDraw GX
(or whatever it was) isn't going to help one bit,
is it?

Dave Howell
SnarkWorks Typesetting and Book Design
hhowell@blegga.cac.washington.edu