One question that I have heard kicked around is what utility there is, for OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines, to having the old v2 'post' table (which has glyph names) vs a v3 'post' table that omits the glyph names. It is more of a placeholder.
I’ve certainly often talked about the limited (but real) utility of proper glyph names at length in the past. The main use case I know of comes in with CFF (not CFF2) workflows where a print stream is being processed to PDF, the original font is unavailable at the time of processing, and the PDF creator is trying to re-create a text stream at that point—without the encoding available, just glyph names (and GIDs, but they are not much use by themselves). So there are a whole bunch of corner cases in play at once there. But what about glyph names and TrueType outlines?
Well, besides “normal” glyphs that have an encoding, there are glyphs that are unencoded, whose meaning can be backtracked only if one has access to the GSUB table or the text stream. So the glyph name can be a useful shorthand. It would be indispensable in any situation where one is missing the text stream, and has the glyph data but not the GSUB—but when would that reasonably happen with TTF, if at all? (I don’t *think* it happens with print streams, but my knowledge of this is not at all current, plus my recollection could be wrong.)
And are there any other reasons to keep a v2 'post' table around in TTF? Or should it just be dropped to save one or two tens of KB of data?
I’ve certainly often talked about the limited (but real) utility of proper glyph names at length in the past. The main use case I know of comes in with CFF (not CFF2) workflows where a print stream is being processed to PDF, the original font is unavailable at the time of processing, and the PDF creator is trying to re-create a text stream at that point—without the encoding available, just glyph names (and GIDs, but they are not much use by themselves). So there are a whole bunch of corner cases in play at once there. But what about glyph names and TrueType outlines?
Well, besides “normal” glyphs that have an encoding, there are glyphs that are unencoded, whose meaning can be backtracked only if one has access to the GSUB table or the text stream. So the glyph name can be a useful shorthand. It would be indispensable in any situation where one is missing the text stream, and has the glyph data but not the GSUB—but when would that reasonably happen with TTF, if at all? (I don’t *think* it happens with print streams, but my knowledge of this is not at all current, plus my recollection could be wrong.)
And are there any other reasons to keep a v2 'post' table around in TTF? Or should it just be dropped to save one or two tens of KB of data?