Hi Deri,
On Tue Mar 3, 2026 at 2:19 PM CET, Deri wrote:
> A further wrinkle is that since Adobe dropped support for postscript, some
> fonts have switched to using version 3 of the 'post' table:-
>
> ============================================================================
>
> Version 3.0
>
> This version makes it possible to create a font that is not burdened with a
> large set of glyph names. A version 3.0 'post' table can be used by OpenType
> fonts with TrueType or CFF (version 1 or 2) data.
>
> This version specifies that no PostScript name information is provided for
> the
> glyphs in this font file. The printing behavior of this version on PostScript
> printers is unspecified, except that it should not result in a fatal or
> unrecoverable error. Some drivers may print nothing; other drivers may
> attempt
> to print using a default naming scheme.
>
> ============================================================================
>
> You can see this in Adobe's own SourceCodePro otf fonts. So, a reliance on
> postscript glyph names may become difficult.
Hm, not really. All this means is that fonts are not required to provide
glyph names:
Glyph names add to the size of a font and are optional.
(ISO/IEC 14496-22:2019(E), section 5.4.3.8)
In such a case the glyphs should either be mapped to a Unicode codepoint
or some other charset codepoint (see table cmap) or generated by a
substitution rule (GSUB). If neither of those is true, the consumer has
no way to figure out what the glyph represents.
That is to say, fonts providing non-standard glyphs (i.e. ones that lack
corresponding Unicode codepoint) need to continue naming their glyphs if
consumers are expected to use them directly (rather than as a result of
a GSUB rule).
I believe neatroff currently doesn't support fonts without glyph names
at all, but I have yet to see a single font that lack them, so I could
not test this. Your comment regarding SourceCodePro seems incorrect;
I have SourceCodePro Regular locally and opening it in FontForge shows
that non-standard variants have assigned glyph names such as dollar.a,
uni0431.srb, etc. Indeed, neatroff seems to handle it just fine.
Cheers,
onf
