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From: greid@adobe.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.computers.laser-printers
Subject: Re: Badly named characters in PostScript.
Message-ID: <8607202334.AA07977@flyer.LOCAL>
Date: Sun, 20-Jul-86 19:34:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: flyer.8607202334.AA07977
Posted: Sun Jul 20 19:34:00 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Jul-86 07:23:21 EDT
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Jean-Francois,

Luckily, the PostScript names are only really used in the font encoding
vector, and are not normally needed to show characters (except if you need
to build an alternate encoding).  In the Zapf Dingbats font, in fact, the
names were originally chosen to be more descriptive (/childscissors,
/arrowleft, etc.) but were eventually abandoned in favor of boring names
like /a1, /a2, /a3 ....  The mnemonic names were nothing but confusing, as
it turned out, since there were at least two pairs of scissors and I don't
know how many arrows in that font.

The errors in naming are unfortunate, but they tend only to be of
consequence when someone prints out a sample page of characters with their
PostScript names....

Thanks for your note.

Glenn Reid
Adobe Systems
Technical Staff