🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13768@ncoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>As quoted from <159@unmvax.unm.edu> by brainerd@unmvax.unm.edu (Walt Brainerd):
>+---------------
>| A feature we have not implemented, but think desirable is font families,
>| so that switching to _italic_ means italic of the current font family,
>| for example.
>+---------------
>
>I have a macro package for ditroff which does this to some extent; at the
>moment, it's limited to handling bold and italic independently in Helvetica,
>but it shouldn't be difficult to adapt it to handle font families as well.
>The only problem with it is that, since ditroff can't determine fonts
>dynamically from within itself, it would have to be configured from an
>outside program.  (I will probably use an .sy in the macro package to build
>the list on the fly from an ASCII font-description file.)

To another extent, this can most easily be done by having different
typesetter (-Txxx) variants for each "family". For instance, for
PostScript printers, I have -Talw as the default with Times Roman descriptions
stored as R, I, B and BI; -TalwH analogously with Helvetica bold described in
the R, I etc. files. And so on.

Of course, this works transparently with any macro package, and any document
which doesn't assume the availability of specific characters in specific
fonts. Not really a problem.

You'll need to have a back-end (or modify one) so that it selects fonts on
the output device based on the internalname field, or via external
information giving the new mapping. This is pretty trivially done.

The only other problem I've had is marginal worries about how to select
between /copyrightserif and /copyrightsans: generally characters in the
special font which make assumptions about the form of the body font. Of
course, I don't have a /copyrightbookman either.

Ian.