Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Path: utzoo!sq!lee From: lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) Subject: Re: RFC -- a TeX font naming system Message-ID: <1991Apr20.214907.13178@sq.sq.com> Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada References: Date: Sat, 20 Apr 91 21:49:07 GMT Lines: 45 Damian Cugley described an alternative approach to naming TeX fonts. I think that this is an excellent idea. I also think that reading the work done by the working group for DIS 9541-1 and particularly Jim Flowers' contribtions, would be an excellent idea. ISO standards on the structure of font names are in progress, and it does look as if these will be accepted by the MIT X consortium and others. So it would be good to be compatible. Distributed font servers are on their way, and there will be one in X11R5. That one almost certainly won't be fully draft-iso-compliant, because of time constraints, but is _is_ moving in that direction. So a TeX of the future might well be able to make a query to a remote system about fonts, and even acquire a tfm file (or equivalent), as long as TeX can understand the ISO naming conventions. These, like Damian's proposal, are similar to the current (X11 R4) names: -adobe-new century schoolbook-medium-i-normal--24-240-75-75-p-136-iso8859-1 and so forth. ISO names tend to use / rather than -, but the princile is the same. Note that it is useful to separate weight (bold, medium) from face (roman, oblique, slanted, italic), so that using "cbo" for Courier-Bold-Oblique is probably bad. I don't see any advantage in limiting font names to three components. Systems with terminally braindamaged filesystems can use a file containing a full mapping, and can maybe even have a server process which will manage this. It's better to design the system you want, and then try to see how to implement it, than to try and design something with the worst common denominator in mind and then try to extend it. Lee -- Liam Russell Quin, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto... 416 963 8337... lee@sq.com `What one person finds valuable others do not even notice. And they do not notice that they do not notice.' -- Scott Kim, `Interdisciplinary Communication', in `The Art of [HCI] Design'