Re: fontnames for Bitstream Univers

["Walter Schmidt" <wschmi@ibm.net>]

On Sun, 29 Nov 1998 00:21:09 +0000, Rebecca and Rowland wrote:

>><series> ::= ul | el | l | sl | md | sb | b | eb | ub

oh, sorry: "md" should have been "m", of course

>That's what the LaTeX Companion says, but it's just a suggestion for a set
>of standard weights so that people can create fount installations with
>more-or-less consistent weight designations.  [...]
>
>The point I'm trying to get across here is that the listing in the LaTeX
>Companion is a useful guide, but doesn't say anything about LaTeX itself -
>all that listing is is a suggested convention.

Why not follow these suggestions as far as possible?


>Interestingly, the LaTeX Companion misses out on one unusual series: sbc.
>cmss/sbc/n is a defined fount in the standard LaTeX distribution, but
>there's no selection command to give you straightforward access to that
>series and it's not listed outside the relevant fd files.

Well, in my above list I've omitted the modifiers "c" and "n",
because this was not the relevant subject.  (Indeed I am using
cmss/sbc/n frequently.)


>You can map it to anything you like - whether it makes sense or not is a
>different matter.  As an example of the sort of perversions one can indulge
>in with the NFSS: I have some founts which are available in a large range
>of weights.  I've created multiple fd files for some of these sets, and I
>might (for example), select (taking the example above) the fd file for
>`Helvetica heavy' which would give me Helvetica Heavy for the `m' series,
>and Helvetica Black for the `bx' series.  

I agree that one can hardly avoid to go this way with font families
like Univers.  And in this case I really does not matter what the 
internal "weight terms" are.

May I summarize your point of view:

In order to access anything beyond the world of \bfseries and 
\mdseries,  one has to use low-level commands or provide 
customized .fd files, anyway, so we do not gain much convenience 
by restricting to a standard set of <series>.

Hmm, all in all I can hardly object ....


Greetings

Walter

P.S.  Apologizing if you have found my previous message multiple
times on the list.  It came back to me three times, plus a whole
bunch of error messages ....  Don't know what mistake I've made.