Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
> > Peter Constable wrote:
>
> > > But making declarations about fonts having "223 slots" and not knowing
> > > that the platforms in question are not so limited and have not been for
> > > years (in the case of Windows, not since Windows 3.1) is speaking in
> > > ignorance.
> >
> > I am not talking about platforms, I am talking about fonts.
> >
> > Does Adobe now sell, say, the Stone family with more than 223 characters
> > in each variety?
>
> I can't find any evidence that 'Stone family' (= designed by Stone?)
> fonts have been extended, but Postscript fonts can now be much larger.

Yes, Stone, StoneSans, and StoneInformal were designed by Reynolds Stone
in the late 80s I think it was, and StoneIPA was designed by others
shortly thereafter.

> The details are supposed to be in
> http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/5176.CFF.pdf 'The
> Compact Font Format Specification' but it is not clear to me how a
> glyph is selected, either in a PostScript environment or as part of an
> OpenType specification. I presume the large fonts are the 'CID-keyed
> fonts'. As far as I can make out, the large fonts are composed of
> smaller fonts. I suspect these constituent fonts are limited to 256
> (or probably just 255) glyphs, but while I can dimly see how the
> constituent font is selected, it is not obvious how that glyph within
> that constituent font is selected. Just possibly it's done by a
> hardcoded name, but it's far from clear.
>
> Interestingly, the Opentype Specification produced by Microsoft for
> the 'post' table refers to 'the 258 glyphs in the standard Macintosh
> TrueType font file', so all in all Peter Daniels does not seem so out
> of touch. This specification file is dated 22/3/01, and I seem to
> have downloaded it from Microsoft in September 2004.

The first 32 slots are used for control characters (oh, and there's one
in the middle somewhere that serves as non-breaking space that can't be
used for a glyph, so it's actually 222.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...