Re: [apps-discuss] font/*

[Tony Hansen <[e-mail]>]

On 11/12/2011 6:27 AM, t.petch wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Martin J. Dürst"<[e-mail]>
> To: "t.petch"<[e-mail]>
> Cc:<[e-mail]>;<[e-mail]>
> Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:47 AM
>
>
>> On 2011/11/10 18:06, t.petch wrote:
>>> Dave
>>>
>>> My bibles say
>>>
>>> Type(face) Family; Courier, Futura, Century Schoolbook,  ..
>>> Typeface; one of the above with a defined
>>>    - Style: Roman, Italic
>>>    - Weight: Light, Semibold, Bold, ...
>>>    - Width: Ultracondensed, Condensed, Expanded, ...
>>> Type Font; one of the above with a defined Size
>>>    - eg 12-point
>> As I said before in a mail to Dave, the last point worked well for lead
>> type or bitmap fonts, but technology has moved beyond.
> Martin
>
> The concepts have not changed and remain useful, IMO, in any discussion
> on presentation.  What has changed is the implementation detail so when
> I download a new package to my PC, then it will apply to all Fonts, within
> a Typeface, as opposed to having a separate module for each Font.
> (Incidentally, my bibles all relate to laser printing ie to modern technology
> and have nothing to do with lead:-).
>
> But more significantly, as other posts have clarified for me, this thread
> is nothing to do with fonts but with type definition languages, so perhaps
> it should be 'type/*'.

I've seen several hints of wanting to do web Accept-style queries along 
the line of

     Accept: font/arial, font/comicsans

What is it that is really desired?

While this sounds like it might be a nice capability, it really doesn't 
agree with what media types are all about. The Arial font can be 
described in many different font file formats.

Media types are more for describing things like:
     MMMM/datafork-truetype
     MMMM/intellifont
     MMMM/postscriptfont
     MMMM/truedocfont
     MMMM/truetype
     MMMM/webopenfont

(where MMMM is some prefix yet to be determined), within which you can 
have a description of many different fonts, including Arial and ComicSans.

=======

*IF* we were to define a top-level media type, I do *not* think it 
should be named "font", but instead should name it "fontformat" or 
something like that. I think naming it "font" just leads people to have 
false expectations.

=======

I notice that if "application" were used for font format file names, 
some of the font format names would need to include the word "font" as 
part of the name. For example, "application/postscript" can not be used 
for the font format defined in the postscript standard. Instead, it 
would have to be "application/postscriptfont". This *could* be taken an 
argument for using "fontformat" as a top level type, as in 
"fontformat/postscript". However, I don't find it a convincing argument 
by itself.

     Tony Hansen