Re: Glyph ID of a given name

[Harsha Senanayake <harsha mis keells com>]

Hi Anuradha,

> When opentype tables are not available, I can think of two approaches to
> place ligature glyphs in a font.  One approach is to use a local
> standard of assigning glyph IDs for ligatures, and the othe is to use a
> local standard for assigning glyph names for ligatures.  Shaping engines
> will retrive the ligature from the font using the glyph ID or the name.
> However, as of now, only the former is possible without using "tricks".
> Am I missing something?

I read your message yesterday and was wondering what you were upto .. well
I kind of thought you are trying to patch pango to pick the glyph names and
do the layout stuff :-) But I dont think this is going to be a good
solution as certain features like vattu, reph, pstf etc will need to be
applied in a particular order in order to render correctly.

If your objective is to easily convert the existing ttf fonts to otf, still
you'll need to give postscript names to all the glyphs. So why not use ttx
(after naming the glyphs) to extract the post table and then generate the
necessary gsub lookups? You can find certain vowel modifiers and even
automate the feature generation ( abvs - if sinhala ispilla present, blws
..)

I know you are perl fan so search for font:ttf in cpan.

best regards,
Harsha.