Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!jade!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!karlton
From: karlton@decwrl.dec.com (Philip Karlton)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X on a KSR-33?
Message-ID: <203@bacchus.DEC.COM>
Date: 28 Dec 87 19:43:35 GMT
References: <8712280138.AA18937@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Reply-To: karlton@decwrl.UUCP (Philip Karlton)
Organization: DEC Western Software Lab, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 25

In article <8712280138.AA18937@bu-cs.bu.edu> bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>
>Ok, why are font names in the 4.2 server forced to mono-case (lower)?
>It's in the os/4.2bsd directory stuff. I can't find it documented
>anywhere (that's not a flame, that's a hint that perhaps the behavior
>can be just as silently elided.)
>

From the protocol spec on OpenFont:

        Loads the specified font, if necessary, and associates identifier fid
        with it.  The font name should use the ISO Latin-1 encoding, and
        upper/lower case does not matter.

This implies that the client should get the same font independent of asking
for "fixed", "FIXED", "Fixed", or even "FiXeD" have to get the same font. The
sample server implementors chose to implement this by storing all of the
compiled fonts in lower case only names and smashing the requests to lower
case so that the directory lookup would succeed.

Any other scheme that preserves the protocol semantics is fine. For instance,
enumerating all the directories on the font path and building an internal
cache of the font names would work.

PK