AFII

Afii is a designation used in a legacy font-encoding scheme associated with Adobe Type 1 fonts and the TeX/LaTeX ecosystem. In this scheme, glyphs are named with the prefix afii followed by a numeric suffix, rather than by Unicode code points. The afii names identify specific characters, diacritics, and ligatures as they appear in AFII-encoded fonts, and the codes are used by font tooling and by TeX’s font selection mechanisms to locate the correct glyph in a given font.

Origins and usage: The AFII encoding arose in the early days of digital typography to support European languages in TeX workflows before Unicode was widely adopted. It was used by several Type 1 font families distributed for TeX, including URW and other foundries, and became a de facto standard within some German and Central European TeX distributions. Because the same afii name may refer to different glyphs in different fonts, mapping relies on the font’s own metrics file or on TeX font encoding maps.

Glyph naming and mapping: Glyphs are not tied to Unicode points in the AFII system; instead the numeric suffixes correspond to positions in the font’s AFII encoding table. In practice, the afii naming appears in font source, metrics files, and documentation; when converting to modern Unicode-based pipelines, these glyphs are mapped to their corresponding Unicode characters.

Decline and current status: With the rise of Unicode and standard font encodings such as T1, OT1, and TU, the use of AFII has diminished. Some legacy TeX distributions still include AFII-encoded fonts or provide conversion utilities, but new fonts usually adopt Unicode-centric encodings.

See also:

- Adobe Glyph List

- TeX font encodings

- AFII encoding

- Unicode in typography

- TeX Live and LaTeX font tooling