Re: Font naming rears its ugly head again

[Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.Ac.HMC.Edu>]

I've discussed this with a number of people. A few thoughts:

-DVI files tend not to be distributed except under controlled
circumstances. Far more common is the distribution of TeX input
files or printer output files (e.g. PostScript). Therefore, the
point is moot.

-Because of the above point, rather than a generic naming system,
a mapping of the TeX font name to a generic description might be
more useful. e.g., for the simple case of Times Roman, Adobe
Standard Encoding which I might call rptmr and you might call
Times-Roman, we could have a system along the following lines:
  Everybody has maintained a mapping file from local TeX name 
  to a more generic name. This could be generated by a program
  like fontinst, for example. A possible format might be
   rptmr TimesRoman-Regular-AdobeStandardEncoding-*-*
  Before I send you a DVI file, I process it with a program which
  replaces instances of rptmr with Times-Romanetc. You then run
  on your system a program which reverses the process and creates
  a DVI file where the names Times-Romanetc. is replaced with
  Times-Roman. Lack of correlation could be taken care of at 
  this point.

-VF files probably should be part of the exchange when DVI files
are exchanged.

As an aside, on my system, I use a modified Berry scheme for font
naming and not entirely consistently. Effort has been taken to
maintain a database mapping TeX font names to something more
user-friendly.

-dh