From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Martin C.Atkins To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Thai Chicken Message-Id: <20040228111427.7d734606.martin@parvat.com> In-Reply-To: <1077712856.17036.35.camel@zevon> References: <20040224101119.0136e11b.martin@parvat.com> <1077712856.17036.35.camel@zevon> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:14:27 +0530 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0189b8d2-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Sorry, I was out of the office for a couple of days... On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 12:40:56 +0000 Dave Lukes 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}