Re: Demystifying “symbol” fonts

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 11/17/2016 01:00 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> I’m looking into bug 103944, which is mainly about handling so-called
> symbol fonts.
>
> The bullets in the bug document use the “Symbol” font from Windows,
> which has “symbol” cmap subtable that maps characters from Private Use
> Area to its own glyphs. Because the document uses PUA symbols, without
> this font installed or another font that has the exact same glyphs for
> PUA characters we can get anything from boxes to totally unrelated
> glyphs.
>
> Now, AFAIK, all glyphs in “Symbol” font have proper characters in
> Unicode (and the font itself supports them as well, in its non-symbol
> cmap subtable), so my question is what is the expected behaviour here,
> map the PUA to proper Unicode characters? Expect the font or a
> compatible one to be installed and usable? Bundle a compatible font?

Another interesting question would be whether LO makes it too easy to 
create a document with PUA instead of "proper" characters (by 
deceivingly offering PUA characters in "Insert - Special Character...", 
say), but looking at 
<https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103944> that bug 
.doc at least is presumably created with something else?