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: <DAMIAN.CUGLEY.91Apr17163401@pierrot.prg.ox.ac.uk>
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'
