I've been reading through the specification for SVG fonts and I stumbled across this tidbit:
glyph-name = "< name > [, < name > ]* "
A name for the glyph. It is recommended that glyph names be unique within a font. The glyph names can be used in situations where Unicode character numbers do not provide sufficient information to access the correct glyph, such as when there are multiple glyphs per Unicode character. The glyph names can be referenced in kerning definitions.
Emphasis mine. This seems to suggest my understanding of what fonts are is wrong. I'd always understood them as the one to one mappings of unicode code point (computer representation of a character) to glyph (the visual representation of a character). It leaves me with several questions.
- How do font rendering engines choose which glyph to display for code points with multiple glyphs?
- How is that character then stored in strings? How is the extra information dictating which of the multiple glyphs to be used attached to the unicode code point?
- Has anyone ever seen a real world example of a font that has multiple glyphs for a single unicode code point?