[Pkg-fonts-devel] Standardizing the names of the font packages

[Rogério Brito]

Dear people.

Another e-mail of mine.

(Well, all of these are just summaries of what has been going on my mind
since I was accepted on the team.)

We have, perhaps, 3 major common scalable font formats: PostScript,
TrueType and OpenType. It seems that some work has already gone into
standardizing the names of the font packages, but I still have some
questions:

* for TrueType, OpenType, and PostScript, the prefixes used seem to be,
  respectively, ttf-, otf- and t1-, if I understand it correctly. Of
  course, a PostScript font may not always be in Type1 format.

  The way I see it, the end-user (not the overly specialized typesetter)
  should not care that much about the type of the fonts that s/he will
  use and it would be enough to just use the ps- prefix for package
  names that contain PostScript fonts.

  Is this too wrong? :-)

* the second part of the names of the fonts seem to include the maker (I
  am using the work "maker" here in a general sense). In some cases, the
  maker is well known (say, ttf-bitstream-vera), but that's not always
  the case: see ttf-thai-arundina.

  It would be desirable to have the names of the font packages in the
  form format-maker-name[-extra], where the part enclosed in brackets
  would say some extra information.

  If the maker is not known, perhaps some placeholder could be put
  there?

  Yes, I would have some difficulties when packaging something like this:

  ,----
  | Family:              ITC Garamond Std
  | Subfamily:           Light
  | Full name:           ITC Garamond Std Light
  | PostScript name:     ITCGaramondStd-Lt
  | Preferred family:    ITC Garamond Std
  | Preferred subfamily: Light
  | Mac font menu name:  ITC Garamond Std Lt
  | Version:             OTF 1.018;PS 001.000;Core 1.0.31;makeotf.lib1.4.1585
  | Unique ID:           1.018;ADBE;ITCGaramondStd-Lt
  | Designer:            Tony Stan
  | Vendor URL:          http://www.adobe.com/type
  | Trademark:           ITC Garamond is a trademark of International Typeface Corporation.
  | Copyright:           Copyright © 1994, 2001 Adobe Systems Incorporated.  All Rights Reserved.
  | License URL:         http://www.adobe.com/type/legal.html
  `----

  Should maker be ITC (International Typeface Corporation) or should it
  be Adobe? I would vote on itc, regarding Adobe as just a distributor,
  not a "maker".

  Also what about a font with its family "Sabon LT Std" (LT stands for
  Linotype, to the best of my knowledge). Would it be packaged as
  otf-lt-sabon-std (if it were OpenType, of course)?

  I guess that these are some difficulties that the team would have, but
  it would be quite nice to have them solved already in a systematic way
  (disclaimer: I have not yet read the fonts subpolicy).


Thanks for any comments,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
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