Glyphnames keep changing

[Georg Mayr-Duffner]

smed inherited this issue from FF: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/472

[Khaled Hosny]

Is there any steps to reproduce this?

[Georg Mayr-Duffner]

I don’t really know, to me it looks like random. I’ve edited the font EBG12-Regular yesterday with smed (changed one letter and added an unencoded glyph, https://bitbucket.org/georgd/eb-garamond/commits/da179634ce5defccf4d172561016ffc93d6ba7a8 ). Today I added another unencoded glyph and a lookup which resulted in name changes.

[Georg Mayr-Duffner]

A testfont with all glyphs that have ever changed names without my wanting it and not knowing why. I have no idea how I could reproduce the changing. At least glyphnames uni01dd and uni01e5 are faulty.

[Khaled Hosny]

The SFD of EBGaramond12-Regular has the name list set to “AGL without afii”, which is probably a left over from when the font was created. Did you try to explicitly switch the fonts to AGLNF (Encoding → Rename Glyphs → AGL For New Fonts)? But we shouldn’t be renaming glyphs without user request nevertheless.

[Georg Mayr-Duffner]

Thanks for this finding! I’ll do as you suggest and look if it stays quiet now.

The funny thing about the renaming is, I couldn’t find a source for uni01dd and uni01e5. I tried grepping around in FF and smed sources with no success.

Edit - I forgot: sometimes I did see the renaming happening when toggling encoding → compact

[Khaled Hosny]

The compact thing is broken by design, it need to be rewritten to not mess with the glyphs.

[Georg Mayr-Duffner]

Another thing: Shouldn’t AGLFN be default? AGL (current default) does a few deprecated things.

[Khaled Hosny]

It should be. IIRC that what I did when I added support for AGLFN.

[Georg Mayr-Duffner]

you’re right. just tested with FF and smed, both have AGLFN as default.

[Barry Schwartz]

Original FontForge and therefore its derivatives IMO are a lot too quick to set certain things for the user. It’s all written on the assumption that George could figure out ahead of time what was appropriate, even though recommendations constantly change, and when really this stuff is exactly what a user might wish to handle through personalized scripts and such.