Problems with glyph variants

(Questions at end)

I have been using Adobe Garamond Expert since the old Mac OS 9 days mainly for old-style numerals. This worked quite well as a character style with FrameMaker until Adobe stopped supporting it. So in Tiger, I used this font successfully in Word 2004.

However, with Leopard and Word 2008, which I have on my new Intel iMac, this font stopped working, with the message in the Character Palette: “The current application does not support glyph variants”.

I have searched the Apple web site and the Web for a precise definition of glyph variant, but have not found one. So I took a peek under the covers with the demo version of FontLab TypeTool 3. There I found that glyph 49, for instance, has a name of ‘oneoldstyle’, with no Unicode. So, as an experiment, I created a new font from Adobe Garamond Expert with the name ‘one’ and Unicode 0030.

This personal font worked fine. Character Palette recognized characters 0-9 as standard glyphs and I could use the font in Word 2008 just like I had done with Word 2004. However, unless I pay $99 for TypeTool, I cannot really use this font because TypeTool corrupts some of the glyphs. Eventually, I plan to convert my Word documents to FrameMaker running under Windows under Parallels desktop, where I can use OpenType fonts. At the moment, I am using Word mainly as a drafting tool and InDesign is not powerful enough for the long, complex book I am writing.

I could let the matter rest there, but I have recently come across another problem with glyph variants and would like to understand the general principles underlying this concept. Doing some research into the languages used by early civilizations, I looked at Wikipedia’s page for Devanagari, the alphabet of Sanskrit and many modern Indian languages.

Safari displayed the characters in the alphabet quite OK, apparently using font Devanagari MT, distributed with Leopard. However, when I tried pasting some of these characters into Word, Word did not recognize the font. Checking on the Microsoft forum, I saw that people were having many problems with the way that Word handles fonts. So at first I thought that this was just a Microsoft problem. Safari, Firefox, TextEdit, InDesign, and Illustrator all recognize Devanagari MT OK. But the old FreeHand MX also did not. So this could not just be a Microsoft problem; it seems to be more systemic.

To get around this problem, I discovered that Arial Unicode MS, also distributed with Leopard, contains the Unicode devanagari glyphs: U0900-U097F. However, they did not appear as alternates in the collections pane of the Code Tables window. I can see these glyphs in the Glyph window for Arial Unicode MS, but Character Palette tells me again, “The current application (Word) does not support glyph variants”.

I can insert these characters into InDesign, with the warning “This is a glyph variant; it may not be displayed correctly in other applications or on the Internet”. Investigating Arial Unicode MS in TypeTool, I find that U0907 (index 1383) has the correct Unicode with a name ‘uni0905’. The corresponding glyph in Devanagari MT has the same Unicode, but with a name ‘adeva’. However, the standard Unicode name for this glyph is ‘DEVANAGARI LETTER A’.

It would seem from this that neither the Unicode nor the glyph’s name is what determines whether a glyph is a variant or not. Maybe both are needed. For changing the code and name in Adobe Garamond Expert worked fine.

A few questions arise from these experiments:

(1) What exactly are the defining attributes for a glyph variant?
(2) Putting this question the other way round, what are the defining attributes for a glyph that would enable it to display correctly in all applications and on the Internet.
(3) If the name is significant here, what name should be used?
(4) What is it about Devanagari MT that prevents it from appearing in the font list for Word 2008 and FreeHand MX? (I haven't investigated, but I suspect that there are some other fonts in this category. Illustrator CS3 presents this font in angle brackets () in its fonts list, like one or two other fonts. So perhaps it also finds this font a little suspect.)
(5) Is there an Apple paper, or more general one, that describes the general principles behind the modern way of handling fonts? I sometimes find with issues like this that information is either too basic or too advanced, intended mainly for developers. So is there a middle path for people like me, IT savvy, but not experts in any one field? The TypeTool user guide, for instance, doesn’t mention glyph variants. Yet they clearly affect the way that fonts are presented to and used by users.
(6) From my perspective, moving to Leopard and Word 2008 reduced the facilities available to me with respect to handling fonts and glyphs. I am very reluctant to spend $99 to overcome these deficiencies. So is there any hope that Apple, at least, might make life a little easier for us in this respect?

12-15 years ago, when working in the IT industry, I had some understanding of fonts on Mac, Windows, and IBM mainframes. But now I am retired, engaged in other activities, I have less time to pay to technological issues. Nevertheless, it would be good to deepen my understanding because I would like to rid myself of this thorn in the flesh. And with a better conceptual understanding, I could more effectively deal with any further font issues that might come up.

Thanks in advance for any assistance

Paul
Sweden