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Why not Cyrillic Glyph Names instead of afii00xx?
Cyrillic glyphs have names just like any other script. If I create a Greek font, alpha is the name of the first letter, not a code. I am not a Russian speaker and have a hard time going back and forth between the glyph name, unicode number, what the glyph looks like, and the so-called glyph name afii_thing. Is there a reason why they can't just use the real glyph names just as they do in Latin and Greek? I feel like I need a Rossettastone to tell me what I am looking at.
ChrisL
--Frustrated neophyte Cyrillic Script attempter :-{
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7 Jun 2006 — 5:31am
Also, is there a table that has all the Cyrillic glyphs with their names, what they look like, their unicode address, and their so-called name?
ChrisL
7 Jun 2006 — 5:56am
Chris, if no one else posts anything, i'll try to work something up later today. I may have to do some research of names for some of the non-Russian glyphs though.
7 Jun 2006 — 6:20am
Paul,
Thanks muchly! I certainly appreciate your kind offer but I don't mean for you to go to great lengths. I was just hoping someone had a link and there was already something available. If there isn't, I will do the leg work myself.
You are a good friend and I don't want you to go above and beyond the call of Duty. Besides, I don't want you to miss out on all that exciting party life in Buffalo :-)
ChrisL
7 Jun 2006 — 6:40am
>> Is there a reason why they can’t just use the real glyph names
Adobe Standard Cyrillic Font Specification, P.7:
"2.2Why Use AFII Glyph Identifiers?"
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/5013.Cyrillic_Font_Sp...
>>is there a table that has all the Cyrillic glyphs with their names, >>what they look like, their unicode address, and their so-called >>name?
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/cyrillic/index.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/cyrillic_supplement/index.htm
7 Jun 2006 — 6:45am
hi chris,
probably not completely what you're looking for, but for a start:
decodeunicode.org
the single pages referring to the resp. unicode blocks (greek + coptic, cyrillic + cyrillic supplement) are nicely hidden to the left of that double dotted line :-)
hope this helps at least a bit.
7 Jun 2006 — 6:46am
See also http://www.unicode.org/charts/
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0500.pdf
7 Jun 2006 — 6:47am
At www.unicode.org/Public/4.1.0/charts/ you can grab CodeCharts.pdf (ca 30MB). Cyrillic starts pp 40, the information include glyph names. [But this is only half of the answer. Being curious for the other half myself.] ;-)
[edit: One minute too late!]
7 Jun 2006 — 6:52am
Alexy, Franz, Karsten! THANKS GUYS!!!
ChrisL
7 Jun 2006 — 6:58am
This archive includes useful AGLafii2AGLuni.ren and AGLuni2AGLafii.ren files.
7 Jun 2006 — 2:11pm
Here are all the 'afii' names you'll need
Adobe Glyph List For New Fonts
Use it and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble :)
7 Jun 2006 — 2:53pm
BRAVO Miguel! You guys are the best!
ChrisL
7 Jun 2006 — 5:27pm
The script below will work with John's .REN files referred above (and, of course, with any file one might create). Just put it in FontLab's Macro folder. It requires Robofab.
http://www.adhesiontext.com/typophile/GlyphRenamer.zip
7 Jun 2006 — 11:30pm
>>The script below
Also Rename glyphs by scheme macro included in FontLab on Steroids Pack does the same thing.
http://steroids.fontlab.net
8 Jun 2006 — 1:07am
> macro included in FontLab on Steroids Pack does the same thing
Not for me (on a Mac). That's why I had to write my own.
In addition, my script does not require the renaming files to be in a specific folder, to have a specific extension, or to have a specific header. All it requires is a text file with two columns of names separated by white space (can be 1 or several space characters or tab entries).
8 Jun 2006 — 5:23am
Miguel, no-wonder Adobe hired you :-)
Thanks to you all for being so helpful. Now, if I only could learn to speak Russian...:-)
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 6:47am
Here you go Chris...
8 Jun 2006 — 7:34am
Danka Tovarich Simonson!
My 50 cents is in the mail :-)
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 7:39am
As you can see, I only paid 39¢ for my copy--over 20% off the publisher's list price! It pays to shop around.
8 Jun 2006 — 7:42am
LOL!!!
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 11:19am
"Danka Tovarich Simonson!
My 50 cents is in the mail :-)
ChrisL"
Actually Chris that would be more like "Spasiba Simonson!" Unfortunately I can't translate the rest for you... Ya Ponymiu Ruski nyem noga... and I think I absolutely butchered the phonetic spelling too.
8 Jun 2006 — 11:42am
У Вас прекрасно получается
8 Jun 2006 — 4:29pm
Michael,
Now you see how badly I need Mark's book :-)
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 4:32pm
Looks great David--wish I knew what it says :-)
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 4:51pm
It's implicit in many of the comments, files and links, but I didn't see anybody come out and say it. So, for other readers who are not as familiar with this stuff:
You can of course use whatever glyph names you like for your own internal (production) usage. But when generating the final font, the afii names from the Adobe Glyph List For New Fonts are preferable so that they will be recognized by potential consumers of the font.
Cheers,
T
8 Jun 2006 — 5:02pm
> wish I knew what it says
You're doing fine*
( > Actually Chris that would be more like “Spasiba Simonson!”* )
8 Jun 2006 — 5:12pm
Thanks Thomas.
Why the afii names to begin with? They are not used for Greek? Why not Ka. Be Ze Ef?
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 5:51pm
Spasiba David.
ChrisL
8 Jun 2006 — 6:30pm
> Why the afii names to begin with? They are not used for Greek? Why not Ka. Be Ze Ef?
Chris, looks like you missed Alexey's comment above.
9 Jun 2006 — 2:53am
I have Russian on tape, Russian on CD, three different books, and a wife from Azerbaijan who's first language is Russian and I currently know only about 40 Russian words... so I guess it has more to do with how disciplined and persistent you are than what (or how many) learning tools you have... at this rate my month old daughter will quickly know more Russian than me. Sometimes I feel like Koko the gorilla, counting and tracking how many words I know... though at this point I think Koko knows over 1000 signs and over 2000 spoken words, so I am way behind in comparison in Russian...lol
9 Jun 2006 — 3:40am
Hello
This is my first comment on typophile.
i am now finishing my MD at type & media kabk the hague.
I am working on Arabic typefaces and I have the same problem that is mentioned conserning the naming of the glyphs. It could be very annoying while in the stage of designing your font to keep using the affixxx naming.
What i did is that i made my own incoding ( 1. modified the agl.nam in the mapping folder of fontlab. 2. added my personal encoding .enc file in the encoding folder of fontlab) file in the with my own naming for my font.
I use this encoding during the design process, but when it comes to generating the font, i
made a script using Robofab that changes all my personal names back to unixxx before generation. I can also do it to change the names back to affixxx.
The nice think about that is only have to do this naming and encoding stuff once, and then you will use it always and the design process will be much more friendly.
Ok
cheers
pascal zoghbi
9 Jun 2006 — 6:37am
Thanks Pascal, and welcome to typophile!
It seems great minds think alike. Miguel, Thomas, and Alexy also use a renaming method.
ChrisL
10 Jun 2006 — 1:28am
well here is my script that i use.
it does not need any glyph name list file to refer to.
it transforms all the names to uni + the unicode number it has.
it only works if you want the glyph names to be in unixxxx.
---------------------------------
#FLM: Glyph name to uni pascal
#pascal zoghbi
from robofab.world import CurrentFont
f = CurrentFont()
for g in f:
uni = g.unicode
if uni:
unicode = "%X" %uni
name = g.name
lastBit = ""
numberOfZero = 4-len(unicode)
if name.count("."):
k, lastBit = name.split(".")
lastBit = "." + lastBit
uni = "uni" + "0"*numberOfZero + unicode + lastBit
g.name = uni
f.update()
-------------------------------
i do not know yet how to attach files.
so only copy and past the script and it will work.
Maybe you need to insert the tabs again properly if when copying and pasting the tabs were removed or so.
can someone tell me how can a attach file which are not images.
ok
cheers
Pascal Zoghbi
MD type & Media
10 Jun 2006 — 5:10pm
Thanks Pascal!
Attaching files is limited to GIF, JPEG, and PNG. You need the latest Flash driver installed to see the "insert image" link below the text box for "Post New Comment".
ChrisL
10 Jun 2006 — 8:28pm
As a matter of fact, a large number of cyrillic glyphs have historical long names, following greek tradition. These are widely used by linguists and known to educated speakers of slavonic languages. The same names are used for Glagolythic alphabet, which is different from cyrillic in glyph shapes only. Details can be found on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet. I believe these names work better as glyph names because there are less conflicts with greek (Fita =/= Theta) and latin (On =/= O, Uk =/= U).
11 Jun 2006 — 4:13am
WTF is danka!?
11 Jun 2006 — 5:07am
Thank you Sergei Egorov. It all becomes clearer now!
ChrisL
11 Jun 2006 — 6:48pm
Chris, to address your background question: The Greek alphabet is essentially used to write a single language, so transliterated letter names can be used for glyphs without causing problems for developers who might call them something else. The Cyrillic script, on the other hand, is used to write more than fifty languages, and not all of them call the letters by the same names or even use them to signify the same phonemes. So codes are better for standard glyph names. That said, I use the uniXXXX form names for Cyrillic letters, not the old afii codes, since they are a bit easier to remember once one knows the Unicode set, are more efficient in terms of font size, and save me from keeping track of two different code naming conventions. You would only need to use afii names in Type 1 fonts with some pretty ancient software.
I use transliterated glyph names largely based on modern Russian names during production, and switch to the uniXXXX names for the post/CFF table entries. My Cyrillic production names are preceded by c. as a script indicator, which distinguishes e.g. Cyrillic c.A from Latin A.
11 Jun 2006 — 7:12pm
Thanks John! That seems like a great system!
Now it all makes sense.
ChrisL
12 Jun 2006 — 1:03am
hi pascal,
good to hear about your project. i am currently working on my ma at the typeface design course in reading - and as it happens, i am also working on an arabic typeface!
thank you for sharing your script - it doesn't work with my configuration, for which platform did you write it?
i am working on winxp fl 5.0.2., python 2.3.5, robofab 1.1.1
12 Jun 2006 — 12:54pm
Chris,
I second John's explanation. A simple example: in Russian, afii10068 (U+0433) is pronounced "g" (like in "good") but in Ukrainian, this letter is used to write a dark "h" sound (something like in "hat") while "g" is written using afii10098 (U+0491). There are other situations like that. A similar issue can be made between the Hebrew and the Arabic script. The Hebrew letters are practically used to write only one language so one could theoretically use "descriptive" transliterated names for the Hebrew glyphs, especially that the Hebrew letters have actual names (e.g. "aleph"). But the Arabic script is used to write many different languages of the world and the heavily diacritic structure of the script makes descriptive names at least illogical -- you end up with names like "dotless beh", which make little sense because you're mixing visual and phonetical elements.
A.
12 Jun 2006 — 2:31pm
Thanks Adam!
It seems as though Latin script, even with all the diacritics, is quite simple to deal with compared to most other scripts. I can't imagine how complicated the Asian scripts must be!
ChrisL
12 Jun 2006 — 3:56pm
>I can’t imagine how complicated the Asian scripts must be!
Once Fiona showed me one Indic font she was working on, and I got lost right in the first handful of glyphs... :/
12 Jun 2006 — 6:16pm
Miguel,
If I ever threaten to do an Asian script, STOP ME!!! They look incredibly beautiful but I am too old to learn enough about them to finish one before I die :-)
ChrisL