[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Inverted (=reflected) N



At 06:29 PM 2/5/98 GMT, Chris Rowley wrote:

>> While I agree with the logic of this naming scheme, I'm afraid that
>> the glyph names in existing AFM files aren't always systematic, not 
>> to mention that some glpyhs are named by meaning rather than form, 
>> i.e. "suchthat" rather than "epsiloninv" (actually "epsilonrot") 
>> or even "nabla" instead of "Deltainv". It is certainly possible to
>> introduce a consistent naming scheme in our .etx and .mtx files, 
>> but that doesn't solve all problems.

>It does not indeed.  My recent experience with the vastly similar are of text
>symbol names shows that it is immpossible to find a naming scheme that
>is consistent in any but the narrowest sense that it fits some rules
>used by the person who invented for what seemed like good reasons at
>the time...and even that is very difficult.

There are many examples of such things:

mu	micro
Omega	Ohm
Delta	increment
Sigma	summation
Pi	product
middot	periodcentered

These correspond to the many-to-many relationship between characters and
glyphs.
We often think only of how one character can be repesented in several
different
ways (think of the two forms of a and the two forms of g for example).  But
there
are also plenty of examples where one glyph stands for more than one
character.

Using the `not invented here' philosophy (which occurs no only in the TeX
world!),
Microsoft has consistenly used a name different from the one used by Adobe
when
there were two names.  Indeed the above come directly from comparable
TrueType and Type 1 fonts.  You can find more if you compare the TrueType
and Type 1 version of Lucida Sans Unicode.

Regards, Berthold.