What is a “font encoding\?
The addressing scheme used for a fonts glyphs is called a “font encoding”. For example, in the X Window System, fonts are defined as arrays of glyphs indexed by an integer index. In these fonts, the mapping between the integer index value and the glyph is known as the “encoding” of the font. Other font technologies have different ways of accessing the glyphs in the font. For example, glyphs in PostScript Type 1 fonts are named using symbolic names. In order to make the use of Type 1 fonts convenient, such fonts may also contain mapping tables mapping character set encoding code points to the symbolic names of glyphs (there will be one such table per supported character set encoding). These mapping tables are sometimes referred to as “font encodings”.
