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

["Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@csc-sun.math.utah.edu>]

"Walter Schmidt" <wschmi@ibm.net> writes on Wed, 31 Dec 97 09:56:46 +0100:

>> The 8.3 restriction is going to become obsolete soon, ...

I'd like to quote Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

        The evil that men do lives after them;

That statement is certainly true of IBM PC DOS!

Much as some of us would {\em like\/} IBM PC DOS to go away, the
installed base is far too large for that to happen in a hurry.  Even
among Windows users, a significant fraction are still at Windows 3.x
with its 8+3 filename length limitation.  And membership polls in the
various TeX user groups will certainly show that the majority of TeX
users work on such systems, even if many of the implementors have much
more pleasant development systems.  At Hill Air Force base north of
here, I'm told that there are missile computers that were built in the
1950s, and at TUG'97, we heard a talk about an IBM product that embeds
TeX inside a PC for typesetting and printing automobile sales and
leasing contracts.

I therefore suggest that mapping files are the only reasonable
solution to this problem. Then TeX users can employ long descriptive
font names, without being crippled by an inadequate file system.

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