Re: Physical and logical fonts

I think I see what's confusing you. The logical font name intrinsically
"represents" no characters. It is only the mapping of physical fonts to
the logical font name that supplies the visual representations of
characters (i.e. glyphs).

Lets pretend I am a typographer, I create four monospaced truetype fonts
as follows:

1. RGB-LETR.TTF containing glyphs for characters ABCDEF...XYZ
2. RGB-NUMR.TTF containing glyphs for characters 0123456789
3. RGB-PUNC.TTF containing glyphs for characters ,.:;'`"~
4. RGB-BRKT.TTF containing glyphs for characters ()[]{}<>

Now I install those fonts and edit font.properties to associate these
four physical fonts with the Java logical font "monospace".

None of my physical fonts has glyphs for more than 26 characters.
But logical font "monospace" now has glyphs for 52 characters!

Instead of A-Z, 0-9 - imagine different (or overlapping) subsets of the
Unicode set. One fonts might have the math symbols, another the arabic
glyphs, and so on.