Re: [9fans] Re: Thai Chicken

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

Sorry, I was out of the office for a couple of days...

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 12:40:56 +0000 Dave Lukes <davel@anvil.com> wrote:
> > What I never understood was why there isn't a "if the character isn't found,
> > then look in *this* font" entry.
>
> Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!  That way lies TrueType.

Most of the arguments against my suggestion seem to fall into:

1) It will be difficult to find fonts that work well together

2) If badly configured, the consequences could be horrible

3) My suggestion is too hacky

4) Sometimes one doesn't need/want this

To address these in turn:
1) It will be difficult to find fonts that work well together:
Maybe. However, having characters "disappear" isn't too good either!
(unless one accidentally cat'ed a binary, in which case you don't really
care what the output looks like. In other cases, presumably the
characters were there for some purpose?)

2) If badly configured, the consequences could be horrible
This is true of just about everything in software (and elsewhere).
So don't configure it badly - at least you would have another option
to help with the configuration.

3) My suggestion is too hacky
Possibly: I was hoping that people could suggest better approaches
that would solve the problem, rather than just saying "Ugh, that's
horrible". For example, one could introduce a new layer in the font
files, with the first layer defining the font size, and a list of
second-layer files to be searched in order for glyphs. The second
layer would be much like the current font files, but without the font
size information, and the last layer would be the current sub-font
files. This would solve the "recursion" problem, and provide a common
font size across all the files, but was a more dramatic change than I
wanted to propose.

4) Sometimes one doesn't need/want this
So have some fonts that don't use the new mechanism! No-one is saying
that every font *has* to have a default, or that all fonts have to
have the *same* default. If this is *sometimes* useful, then is it
worth the costs? That is surely the trade-off that we, as engineers,
should be discussing? (The answer might well be "no", but surely
there is some balance of cost/benefits one way or the other?)

Martin

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