Real world fonts that include an encoding in their CFF table?

camertron

I am currently working on implementing support for the CFF table and charstrings in a Ruby library. At the moment I'm trying to write tests for the CFF table's encoding structure, but I'm having a devil of a time finding a real-world font that actually specifies an encoding. CID fonts don't specify one, and all the non-CID fonts I've looked at use one of the predefined encodings ("standard" or "expert"). I've downloaded thousands of fonts and for the life of me can't find anything. Can anyone point me to a font that has one of these encoding structures, or is it more of an academic thing that nobody actually uses?

Thomas Phinney

Well, not many people use these in font production. But I think there may be some out there in the wild. As I recall from helping manage the Adobe conversion to OpenType, we had some fonts that might have done this.

I suggest you check the OpenType CFF versions of pi/dingbat fonts from Adobe that have no alphabetic characters. For example Cheq, Sonata, Carta, Symbol, Adobe Wood Type Ornaments.

Consider also the Adobe-produced versions of pi/dingbat fonts licensed from Monotype and subsidiaries: ITC Zapf Dingbats, Mathematical Pi, Border Pi, Bundesbahn Pi, Universal News & Commercial Pi, Universal Greek Math & Pi, Linotype Game Pi, Caravan Borders, the various Linotype “Something” Pi fonts (Audio, European, Decoration, Astrology, Holiday, Warning), 

IIRC, in all these fonts, the Unicode cmap is correct and uses unusual codepoints, with few or no western-Europe alphabetic codepoints. I don't specifically remember, but I strongly suspect the CFF table has an appropriately unusual encoding.

I suspect the good folks at Adobe would be happy to supply you with those first few (Adobe-owned) fonts for testing purposes, or you could license a few online from the usual sources.

camertron

Cool, thanks! I'll check those fonts out