Pictograms and ornaments naming

Ermin Međedović

I'm searching for the best solution for naming more than 100 tailor made (not in Unicode) symbols and pictograms. I had orn001, 002 &c, but colleague told me to name it A.ornm, B.ornm… to Z, then from a-z.
Then what? braceleft.ornm?

John Hudson

Personally, I use private use area encodings for ornaments, and do not map them in OpenType Layout features. My reasoning is that an ornament is a design-specific non-text accessory, and a user either wants that specific ornament image in a document or does not; he or she doesn't want that ornament to be substituted with a different ornament or with some other character such as an uppercase letter or other common symbol. In this respect, a private use area encoding does a more robust job of preserving the specific ornament during document interchange than using OpenType Layout features that might be supported in some software but not in others. If the font ends up being changed at any stage, then the PUA character will fail, but it is more likely to fail in an obvious way than if the ornament has an underlying codepoint that corresponds to, say, an uppercase 'A'.

Thomas Phinney

Naming the glyphs should be dependent on the encoding.

If like, John, you are going to give them PUA encoding, then you could give them glyph names reflecting that encoding (uniE0235 or the like), or descriptive glyph names that remind one of what the glyph is (hollowhouse). Often I recommend glyph names that translate back to Unicode, but that is less important when there is not much information being preserved by that.

If you are going to make them alternates of letters, accessed via those regular letters plus applying the "ornaments" feature of OpenType, then your colleague's suggestion is reasonable.

A lot also depends on what you think your end users are willing to live with. If this is for a specific client, it is worth discussing with them at length in terms of their hopes/expectations for access to the ornaments.

Ermin Međedović

So, now I have Unicode builded names >uni261E< for symbols encoded, and descriptive names >bullet.upload<, for other things not encoded.

Thanks John and Thomas.

Thomas Phinney

I take it "bullet.upload" is accessible as an alternate of "bullet"? If so, that is a reasonable glyph name....

Adam Twardoch

A simple way to combine these two approaches: uniF012.upload (with PUA U+F012 assigned), uniF013.download (with U+F013) etc. So a uniXXXX name portion from the PUA space before the dot, and a human-readable suffix after the dot. The suffix length should not exceed 21 characters (as the max glyphname length is 29 minus 8 characters for "uniXXXX.").