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Font naming rears its ugly head again



Dear all,

I'm currently working on v1.x of the fontinst package for creating
Virtual Fonts out of AFM or TFM files.  A preliminary (very
user-unfriendly!) version was described at the Aston meeting, and is
available from CTAN in fonts/utilities/fontinst.

The fontinst package produces rather different VFs from afm2tfm or
Sebastian's PSNFSS, most noticably in the c&sc fonts, which are
letterspaced.

So, I've been thinking about what I should call these fonts in the
ghastly 8+3 format we all know and... er... love.  At the moment, I'm
using Karl's scheme, so the Adobe Times Roman fonts are:

   ptmrq   Adobe Times Roman u&lc Cork
   ptmrcq  Adobe Times Roman c&sc Cork

But this isn't totally satisfactory, since it makes dvi files rather
unportable... if you receive a dvi file containing the font ptmrq,
whose ptmrq should you use?

To get round this, what I'd like to do is use a `unique' prefix for
the fonts I generate (say `f1' for `fontinst') and then use my own
scheme for the remaining 6 characters.  For example:

   f1ptmXXX  Adobe Times Roman u&lc Cork, made with fontinst
   f1ptmYYY  Adobe Times Roman c&sc Cork, made with fontinst

I was planning to use the remaining three characters (after the `f1'
prefix and the 3-letter family name) to encode a 15-bit number, with
something like:

   5 bits for weight
   1 bit  for slanted / upright
   1 bit  for roman / italic 
   2 bits for u&lc / c&sc / all-caps / all-small-caps
   1 bit  for lining / non-lining digits
   1 bit  for whether it was created with an expert set
   4 bits for encoding

Would anyone object to this?  I'm sorry to have to break the mold of
Karl's scheme, but I can't see any other way of avoiding clashing font
names...

Alan.