PUA encoding and pro users

James Puckett

Has anybody received complaints from professional users about fonts with PUA encoded glyphs causing problems when switching fonts?

SiDaniels

Yes. A recent Mac Office update broke fallback to the PUA Apple logo and people did complain.  

Laura Worthington

I haven't had any issues with that yet, but then again, all of my fonts are for display and used in short word and/or phrase settings... 

Thomas Phinney

Back in the day, Adobe used to ship fonts with all the alternates also PUA-encoded, and I never saw such a complaint. But at the same time, very few people used that mechanism to access those glyphs.

The more educated users are the most likely to make use of PUA (but only when other access mechanisms are unavailable), and also the most likely to understand why they might hit problems when changing fonts.

I have heard from other designers besides Laura, who shared her experience.

I am sure there would be *some* complaints some times, but it seems to not be a major problem. Of course, if you ship docs with your fonts or have an FAQ online, you should cover/explain this issue. Must keep up the educational effort!

Laura Worthington

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with you on this, Thomas, and I'm glad you mentioned it. I think it's absolutely critical to provide documentation, instructions and resources about PUA encoded fonts. I have developed materials on all of this and would be happy to provide them to any type designers who are interested as well to be shared with customers, et al.

Andreas Stötzner

Some products of mine have plenty of PUA characters, mainly according to the MUFI spec. They are heavily used in many editions (mostly print, but also online) and I have not received any complaints about them.

Peter Constable

A key thing is that the likely users should understand what to expect in the way of interoperability. For a specialized audience, such as app developers using icon fonts or medievalists using special medievalist fonts, there's a better chance that you can document the situation and that it will be understood. For typographers and graphics professionals using fonts with "expert-set" alternated encoded as PUA characters, there's a fair chance of getting that understanding.

But for widespread, non-specialized/non-expert cases, like the case Si mentions — an Apple logo that any Mac user can easily enter in a doc without any idea what limitations exist — that seems like a setup for trouble.

So, evaluate the target audience and anticipated usage, and weigh the risks accordingly.

John Hudson

I've spent the past twenty years advising against the use of PUA encodings for typographic variants on the basis that digital text is living text (unlike a printed page), that it persists and should use standard, interchangeable character encoding, which is searchable, sortable, and republishable in the ways that we should be able to expect of digital text, and that using PUA encodings corrupts digital text. I still believe that to be the case, and do everything I can to avoid use of PUA.

But twenty years into OpenType, support for glyph level access to typographic variants remains so unreliable in so many places, that the call from clients to include PUA encodings in fonts is actually increasing, rather than decreasing.

André G. Isaak

@SiDaniels

Do you have a link to a site that describes this MS Office behaviour in more detail? I'm not sure I follow exactly what you're saying.

André

SiDaniels

@André G. Isaak I don't have a page. But it's pretty easy to explain. Regardless of font, if a user entered the Apple logo (PUA mapped) we'd fall back to an Apple supplied font that included the logo. The Office update didn't fallback, so for a font like Calibri the user would get a square box. 

André G. Isaak

@SiDaniels,

Thanks, that clarifies things.

Paul Miller

SiDaniels said:

Yes. A recent Mac Office update broke fallback to the PUA Apple logo and people did complain.  

I tend to have a little fun with the Apple Logo (uniF000) character in my fonts.  How come one company got their logo embedded in Unicode and no other company has a logo allocated to them.

So in the roman font the logo is done straight as it should be but that may not be true for the italic, bold or the bold italic version.

An easter egg perhaps, depends on how Apple centric you are. 

Thomas Phinney

U+F000 is a private use codepoint. Apple or anybody else can do with it as they will—it is not standardized by Unicode.

André G. Isaak

AFAIK the Apple Logo is most commonly encoded at 0xF8FF, not 0xF000 (though both would fall in the private use area).

André G. Isaak

On an unrelated note, the oldstyle figures which this forum uses don't look very good when citing codepoints.

Thomas Phinney

Awww. I like them because the zeros look like little o's. So fooo.... (Thread drift alert!)