What is a CID keyed Font?
A CID keyed font is a postscript (or opentype) font designed to hold Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters efficiently. More accurately a CID font is a collection of several sub-fonts each with certain common features (one might hold all the latin letters, another all the kana, a third all the kanji). This allows font-wide hinting to be crafted for subsets of glyphs to which have something in common. CID keyed fonts do not have an encoding built into the font, and the glyphs do not have names. Instead the font is associated with a glyph set and on each glyph set there are several character mappings defined. These mappings are similar to encodings but allow for a wider range of behaviors. A CID is a glyph index and is used to look up glyph descriptions instead of glyph names in other types of fonts. Using a glyph set FontForge will often be able to map a CID to a unicode character name (but not always), so FontForge will give glyphs names when it can. For more information see the sect