Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>]

Ingo,

>> Which font do you suggest I use for the hard-coded font value?
> 
> Basically, i don't know anything about fonts and don't care
> either, except that:
> 
>  * Please make sure to use something which is guaranteed to be
>    available everywhere by default without requiring users to
>    install anything, or if such stuff does not exist, use
>    generic settings if feasible.  I will never feed any font-
>    related arguments, options or parameters into mandoc and
>    will never set up any font-related configuration files,
>    and if mandoc ever asks me any questions about fonts or
>    produces any font-related error messages, i will get
>    really upset.

mandoc needs hard-coded glyph widths (font-metrics) or you'll get
exactly these configuration questions.  Same goes with my question about
dimensions and margins.  This all happens Magically (TM) in groff.

Your test with gv is the first time somebody's given independent
feedback, so it's not fair to get angry (yet :-)).  The gv problems are
with a lack of hinting in the PostScript file and unrelated to fonts.
I'm missing some sort of mysterious declaration.  These are technically
comments in the PostScript file (!) so it's hard to find which one's
missing.

Hint:  does /anybody/ know PostScript well enough to sanity-check the
files mandoc is generating?

You may not use the PostScript driver--I don't either--but when I first
announced mandoc for both OpenBSD and NetBSD the first complaints were
that it doesn't have -Tps.  Obviously somebody cares or I wouldn't be
doing this.  If in fact nobody does care, a lot of time (and Google's
money) are being spent for naught.

>  * Please do not use anything fancy, neither from the point of
>    view of design, nor from a technical point of view.  Just use
>    the most standard and boring stuff you can find.

Proportional widths are the standard as defined by troff/groff.  If
monospace and un-styled (italic/oblique, bold) were good enough, we
could just stick with mandoc | col -b and read the text file.

> I would also suggest not to waste any time on fonts,
> but of course that is your call.  I don't see the point of
> making anything about fonts configurable.  We are not in
> marketing, we are formatting manuals!

For the record, term_ps.c is pretty much as "complicated" as it's going
to get.  All that I'll add to it is a vspan() function and some smarts
as to the current font mode with respect to glyph width, which will seep
into term.c in a trivially mechanical fashion.  My questions on layouts,
even with fancy two-page output, are trivial to implement.

Thanks,

Kristaps
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