Re: shorter names for TeX fonts

[Thierry Bouche <Thierry.Bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr>]

Concernant « shorter names for TeX fonts (Re: Future of the `Karl Berry Font Naming
 Scheme'...) », Damian Cugley écrit :
« For example, the foundry letter wastes 1/8 of the name on unimportant
« information.  While it is true that Adobe Garamond and Stempel Garamond are
« different, this is a feature only of Garamond and Caslon and a few others; for
« most fonts (including all ITC fonts) versions from different companies should
« be interchageable.  So we could combine three letters into a 3-letter family
« code, increasing the number of possible families by almost a factor of 36.  In
« cases like Garamond, different variations would have different codes.  For
« fonts like ITC Avant Garde Gothic and its clones, there would be one code.

i didn't have time to read this longish contribution, but this is
definitively wrong, even the URW clones bundled with ghostscript are
width compatible & only that (ascenders/descenders, kern pairs differ,
even kerning philosophy differ : they do not try to fake the fi lig
with kerning but use negative kern for proper readability
instead). They couldn't share a TFM. Of course most clones are not
even width compatible (compare bitstream ITC fonts with Linotype's).
   Thierry Bouche.       -----       thierry.bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr
          http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~bouche/