[OpenFontLibrary] Incomplete fonts/dingbat fonts

[Ed Trager]

Do the dingbat fonts on OFLB have Unicode CMAPs?  Are they putting the
dingbat glyphs in the Dingbat symbols block, or just randomly in the ASCII
or Latin-1 blocks?

Fontaine obviously can't tell what the glyphs look like.  Currently Fontaine
does not have an orthography file for the dingbat symbols block, but that
can be changed of course.  Fontaine does currently have orthography files
for the mathematical operators and chess symbols blocks, so obviously
additional symbol blocks can be added.

I don't see why a font that covered only certain symbol blocks -- Dingbats,
chess symbols, mathematical operators, or otherwise-- should not be allowed
on OFLB.  In the future one will be able to search for fonts meeting certain
criteria -- such as covering a specific orthographic block -- so as long as
such fonts are properly constructed (i.e. have a Unicode CMAP) and can be
properly categorized in the site's database, why not?

Best - Ed


On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Ben Weiner <ben at readingtype.org.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Dave Crossland wrote:
>
>>
>> We have agreed, I think, that we want OFLB to be a source to visitors of
>> quality fonts, not lots of dross. Ed's fontaine is going to check unicode
>> coverage of fonts, and testing it I found that a font I'm developing, with
>> only lowercase glyphs, fails the coverage check since its a latin1 encoded
>> font without a cap A, and so its obviously not a fully useful font.
>> Therefore OFLB ought to politely decline it as a submission and ask me to
>> fill out the caps, I think.
>>
>> This raises a problem for dingbat fonts, which we have some of, which have
>> random glyphs used. I think the solution there is to direct such fonts to
>> OCAL, right?
>>
>>  I would, tentatively, agree. Though thinking of the origins of OFLB I
> suspect they might wish to direct dingbats back here ;-)
>
> Ben
>
> --
> Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html
>
>
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