Re: Future of the `Karl Berry Font Naming Scheme'...

[mackay@cs.washington.edu (Pierre MacKay)]

Use PDF and the whole question becomes moot.  As long as you set
EmbedAllFonts---and most likely 99 MaxSupsetPct and SubsetFonts as
well, no one cares what fonts you use.  

Embed fonts in PS and it is much the same.  Especially if and when
dvips subsetting is at last fully operational.

But these, and DVI as well are irreversible transformations of
the source.  One of the primary criteria emphasized by DEK in the
development of TeX is its archival capabilities, in the sense that
source from 1984 can be used to generate DVI in 1997.  This is
the whole reason why certain "enhancements" to TeX are forbidden
to use the name TeX.  The TeX and LaTeX communities are strongly
committed to supporting the interchangeability of source, and they
have largely succeeded.  My TeX files are largely useless to
anyone else because they depend on a thirty-five page macro package
which I have not chosen to make public (largely because I can't put
the resources in to support it), but if I sent source and macro
package together to some other site, it would run.  It could with
minor adjustments run even on an 8+3 system.  

The only reasonable alternative to this TeX cross-platform compatibility
is SGML, but SGML, properly done, sets up nothing in the way of
cocrete formatting.  If you wanted to show off formatting with an
SGML file you would have to send the abstract->concrete interpreter
along with the SGML source.  Not much different from a TeX macro
formatting file.  

So, as long as all you want is to offer an already typeset image
to the outside world,  PostScript or PDF are the appropriate formats.
(DVI is a poor third  and as you point out, requires compatibility
in the font library available at the receiving end.  DVI was never
intended as a medium of communication anyway and the suggestions
that it be used in that manner (made about 12 years ago) died a
well-deserved death.)

The use of fonts in PDF and PostScript is not a problem.  I don't
see why anyone would want to embed the fonts in either format under
anything but the full PostScript FontName, or the generated SUBSET name.