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: <1991Apr24.183211.7390@sq.sq.com> Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada References: <1991Apr20.214907.13178@sq.sq.com> Date: Wed, 24 Apr 91 18:32:11 GMT Lines: 45 Damian.Cugley@prg.ox.ac.uk (Damian Cugley) writes: >From: Liam R. E. Quin > >> 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 am combining the "face" info into one word for several reasons: >firstly, TeX has no useful way to treat weight, width, slant etc. >separately; secondly, it's shorter; thirdly, it allows the old fonts -- >cmr12 etc. -- to remain unchanged. Those are all good reasons. >I prefer > Adobe-NewCenturySchoolbook-r >[...] >to the XLFD name > -Adobe-New Century Schoolbook-Medium-I-Normal--24-240-75-75-P-136-ISO8859-1 > >if only because it is shorter -- and IMO more comprehensible. Well, so do I from a user's point of view. The X11 name does allow font substitution, at least to a certain extent. I _would_ prefer to see use of existing font names rather than see the invention of a new set of conventions, though, so keeping Bold-Oblique still sounds better to me. There's no reason why there can't be a short cut, so the macros put the long form in the dvi file even if the user typed Compugraphic-Triumvirate-bo in the input. Most users would probably be happy wih ``Helvetica'' and would take Triumvirate or Adobe or Linotype or whatever they got, I imagine! I have had mail asking that font components be limited to 6 or less characters, which also seems to me to be an unnecessary abomination, since the fonts do not have to be stored under the long names on the computer. 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'