Re: [Devel] Selecting a charmap

[Antoine Leca]

Ross Tulloch wrote:
> 
> If, for example, I have a Mac TrueType font that contains a swedish
> encoding, how do I set this charmap as the current encoding?

What is a "swedish encoding" in your mind? There is nothing like that
in the TrueType specifications, nor in Apple specifications: Swedish
characters are nothing special, the basic MacRoman encoding (1,0) deals
with them without any problem.

Now, perhaps you have in mind the fonts that targets the languages that
use so-called extended-MacRoman: examples are Islandic, Croatian,
Turkish, or Ukrainian which is obviously Cyrillic-based, to take "official"
Apple examples, or either Saami, Esperanto, Old Irish, or even accentuated
Danish (school used, with the acute over a-ring, ash or stroked o).
To explain the problem, because of the 256 limit, these systems have changed
the meaning of some characters, and accordingly the TT fonts for these systems
have different glyphs than the standard MacRoman encoding.

The situation is somewhat similar to the ugly Windows fonts that uses the
1252 (West Europe) range, but rather have the glyphs for another encoding
(like 1250 for the CEARIAL.TTF released with Eastern Europe versions of
Windows 3.1x). But there is a main difference: while they are not in the cmap,
the glyphs for the "extended Roman" languages (like stroked D, dotless i,
thorn, ...) do have a assigned position in the "standard" Apple font. And
Apple recommand that these glyphs should be retrieved with their Postscript
name rather than with their cmap-id. So, at least for Islandic, Croatian and
Turkish, I am believing that the way to go is to bypass entirely the MacRoman
cmap.


Antoine