What are "icapitalsmall" and "D.circled" for?

[AndreasFaust]

There are 2 strange glyphs in the Latin glyph sets that make me wonder what they are for:

1. "D.circled" in "Latin Plus"
2. "icapitalsmall" in "Latin Beyond" (no Unicode!)

Can anybody help?

[yanone]

D.circled was recently added. It's used for "Protected Design" similar to "Copyright".

icapitalsmall is part of some African languages and we already support it in the GF_Latin_African glyphset. Please note that we’re in the process of (slowly over time) reworking all the glyphsets to use language definitions (denoted by the green or red mark in https://github.com/googlefonts/glyphsets/blob/main/GLYPHSETS.md) because the previous manual assembly approach was too error-prone. So it's possible that the old-school glyphsets such as GF_Latin_Beyond contain several glyphs that will eventually disappear from it.

[AndreasFaust]

Thank you for explaining, @yanone!
I’m curious: As I understand it, "Latin Plus", "Beyond" etc. will be removed and web developers will have to bundle languages manually? Or are demanded glyphs automatically determined by the Google Font API?

[yanone]

I see where you're coming from now.

The Google Fonts API are using subsets which are different from the glyphsets defined here. Even though they both contains glyphset definitions, they serve different purposes.

I've added an explanation to the README of the glyphsets repo to the best of my abilities, but I'm not firm in how subsets are defined or used. I'm involved with the font authoring side, which this repository now solely serves.

I've asked internally what the logic is behind definitions of subsets to be served by the GF API but haven't received a conclusive answer yet.

[AndreasFaust]

Thank you, @yanone, for clarifying.

I tried the API (with "Noto Sans") and there are 2 options for Latin: "Latin", a small subsetting of 281 Glyphs and "Latin Extended", the full range of over 1600 glyphs. And there is the sophisticated option of narrowing the subset to only glyphs of your choice.