Glyph names and their Unicode values

Robin Mientjes

So this is puzzling me. In between all the talk of character sets and language support, I decided to endeavour into some new-to-me Unicode values. I thought it prudent to hand-assign sensible glyph names to corresponding Unicode values – so I have gravecomb, acutecomb, dieresiscomb. However, when I use these glyph names as my glyph template, a lot of Unicode values show up empty (in RoboFont at least).

Now I’m left wondering: how do I keep glyph names that I understand, without having to manually enter all Unicode values?

For comparison, I went into the Adobe Source Sans source. The glyphs have sensible names there, but, for example, hookabovecomb resolves in RoboFont to 0309, but hoicmb, the Adobe name, throws empty. What am I missing? Is there hidden knowledge in the software?

Bahman Eslami

Adobe has a special workflow. When they generate the font using makeotf they also feed the app a file named GlyphOrderAndAliasDB. This file contains the information about which glyph name should be converted to a final production name. So basically with this workflow you can have arbitrary names and in final font you can use production names. makeotf also adds the unicode to the glyph names which it recognizes. That's why glyphs in Adobe Source Sans don't have unicode. You can map different unicode value to your arbitrary glyph name in the Robofont preferences > character set > AGL path. Robofont uses an old "Adobe glyph list" to map glyph names to unicode values and you can find it by googling.

Robin Mientjes

Thanks, Bahman. That answers my question perfectly.