How would Unicode work if it were added to Postscript?

[luser- -droog]

If Unicode support were added to Postscript (either by a
supplement or as part of new release of the language),
how would it work?

Presumably it would be isolated to the font-rendering machinery.
But it might conceivably be useful to add special syntax for
delimiting a Unicode or UTF8 string in the postscript stream.

Ignoring syntax, would the Type 1 font format be able to
handle the encodings? Are CID fonts capable of handling
Unicode mappings? Or would this require an entirely new
font format?

[jdaw1]

Why not allow a more general string type, a 'compound string', being any of:
-- an ordinary string;
-- a glyph name;
-- a Unicode string (special delimiters);
-- an array containing valid compound strings.

Thus [(Quinta do Bom) /fi (m)] and [(Ch) /acircumflex (teau L) /eacute (oville-Barton)] would be valid compound strings.

[luser- -droog]

Finally found some info on this. Apparently Unicode-encoded
data can be decoded automagically with level-2 filters into
integer code-points. And somehow this can be mapped to a
CID font.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/PostScript_FAQ#Does%5FPostScript%5Fsupport%5Funicode%5Ffor%5FCJK%5Ffonts.3F

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, January 9, 2015 at 8:34:17 AM UTC+13, luser- -droog wrote:

> And somehow this can be mapped to a CID font.

But Adobe claims copyright on all the CID encodings, does it not? So you are not free to use them...