Re: [9fans] Re: Thai Chicken

[Martin C.Atkins <martin@parvat.com>]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 08:04:30 -0800 Rob Pike <rob@mightycheese.com> wrote:
> > Surely it would be better if every font contained a full Unicode set
> > (without
> > any bloat/duplication)?
>
> without any bloat?  no chance.  unicode has gotten bloated lately.
> linear B, anyone?

That seems to be the industry disease, bloat... :-(

> there are several reasons why the fonts aren't all full:
>
> 1) unicode keeps growing, so they can only be full temporarily.

Isn't that a good reason for keeping the knowledge about how to make a full
font in one place, rather than in every font file (if one wants every font
to be full)?

> 2) it's easy to forget, but there were no unicode fonts when plan 9
> adopted...

Indeed it is! Thanks for reminding me (I didn't know this detail of
the history - I knew Plan 9 was first with Unicode, but didn't know
lucida sans Unicode was "made for Plan 9" - could we use this as a
slogan, a la "intel inside"? :-)!

> 3) for many applications, you don't want the full set of fonts and
> there is no
>     need to pay the full memory footprint for them.

Sorry - why would you ever (except for your reason 4, below), not want
a full font? I thought the whole point of the nice font-file mapping format
was that one didn't need to pay the "full memory footprint" if you didn't
need all the characters. (I'm assuming the 'full memory footprint' of
the mapping file is acceptable!)

NB I'm advocating full fonts, not a full unicode subfont (that way
lies X11/Windows font madness)!

I'm just asking why there isn't a simpler way of managing the font (mapping)
files, than all the effort that Geoff went to... (Cutting and pasting is easy,
but updating them all when Unicode changes or new subfonts arrive is a pain.
I suppose scripts could generate Geoff's output from some meta description, but
that seems unnecessarily complex, why not just:
	$ mv one_of_geoffs_full_fonts default.8.font
and change the font-reading library to allow:
	$ cat some_font.8.font
	14	11	default.8.font
	0x0000	0x00FF	../pelm/latin1.8
so that some_font.8.font is a full font too?

Please, I'm not trying to make a row. I simply don't understand why this seemingly
obvious solution, apparently has problems I don't understand! Or is the 'problem'
simply that "no-one has got around to doing it yet" - which is fine!)

BTW: I don't see that Chris' arguments affect this, since I'm not proposing
mixing characters from Arial and Dunhill, but rather characters from Arial
and Katakana, Hebrew, etc.... But maybe I'm not "getting" this problem, either!

> 4) on slow lines, it can be very painful to cat a file by mistake that
> has a lot....

OK - I see that could be an issue, but one could still have a 'safe' font, for
such situations.

Martin

--
Martin C. Atkins			martin@parvat.com
Parvat Infotech Private Limited		http://www.parvat.com{/,/martin}