🚀 go-pugleaf

As far as I know, there exists an ISO standard ``Font and character
information interchange'' (ISO 9541-1 or so).  I remember reading it
quite some time ago (or should I say, scanning?  It is not a small
standard and was baptised ``the font monster'' by a colleague).  I
vaguely remember that the interchange happens independent of
underlining character encoding mechanism (like Laten-[1-5], Unicode
ISO 646, MacIntosh charset, SGML public Entity sets, TeX encoding,
troff etc etc.).  ODA (ISO 8613) uses it.

One of the ideas was to have a central font clearimg house.  Each font
supplier could get an unique font identification number from this
clearing house, just like an Ethernet address is always supposed to be
unique.  This way you can identify each font and the glyphs in it
easily.  (Not unlike UniquID and XUID numbers in a PostScript font
description.  And didn't had Xerox also a font registry for
Interpress?).

I assume that one of the reason (apart from the size) this standard
didn't really catched on, is that to standarize something like this,
you need a relative stable world (at least the subset with deals with
fonts).  The explosion of various font technologies we witness the
last 10 years or so, went way to quickly for standarizing bodies to
keep up with.


        jaap