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

[Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>]

[snip]
>The only worse idea is to go the whole way with Macintosh and introduce
>spaces into our file names.  Why not name our fonts
>"Times Roman Regular with set-widths relaxed 1/8 unit and htg encoding
>(TeX Font Metric File)"?  Gets the whole thing right out in the open, and
>the
>use of "" makes it work even in a command-line and shell environment.
>It would make a great label on a Macintosh window, too.  One file
>icon to each row of the window.

On a point of order: Adobe has adopted a semi-consistent naming scheme for
fount files on Macs, because Macs have a 31 character filename limit (32
using the abominable MFS rather than the modern HFS).

It's called the `5+3+3' scheme, because you take the first 5 characters
>From the first element in the name, the first three from the next, and so
on until you run out of name elements.

That means something like Stone Serif Italic gets called `StoneSerIta'.  I
think it's quite nice as a naming scheme - you get unambiguous filenames
that are fairly easy to understand, and they're not too long.
Unfortunately, they do depend on a case change to flag the start of the
next name element.  Macs are happy with mixed-case filenames, but the
filing system isn't case-sensitive, which is a bit odd at least; not all
operating systems are happy with mixed-case filenames.

[snip]

Rowland.