Re: font specification in CSS1

| Jon Bosak wrote:
| > Does anyone care that there is already an ISO standard for font
| > characteristics that addresses all of this?
| 
| Sure. Is there somewhere I can see the parameters and corresponding
| values without buying the document?

Yes.  ISO/IEC 9541-1:1992 Parts 1 and 2 are normative references for
DSSSL (ISO/IEC 10179:1996), and the basic font parameters specified
there were copied into the DSSSL standard.  That document, unlike just
about every other ISO standard in existence, is freely available to
citizens of the U.S. because the Department of Energy obtained a
government finding that our participation in the effort gives us the
right to see what we paid for.  You can obtain a PostScript copy of
10179 (the camera-ready copy for the ISO publication) in the files
named dsssl96f.ps.Z and dsssl96b.ps.Z at ftp.ornl.gov in the directory
/pub/sgml/wg8/dsssl.  An earlier and almost identical committee draft
of the same document is available online at

   http://occam.sjf.novell.com:8080/dsssl/dsssl96/

The best places to look for the values relating to fonts are under the
descriptions of the "paragraph flow object class" and the "character
flow object class".

I put the same information into an even earlier document, the dsssl-o
application profile, where the font characteristics can be found in
the tables of characteristics for the paragraph and character flow
object classes.  A somewhat crufty copy of that document is available
over the Web at

   http://occam.sjf.novell.com:8080/docs/dsssl-o/do951212.htm

and a nice, legal HTML 3.2 copy is obtainable by ftp from
sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/sun-info/standards/dsssl/dssslo
(get do951212.zip).

| I suppose this means I'm going to have to patch my 700+ fonts for
| compliance. Darn.

Well, you've had four years to pressure the font vendors into
complying with the standard.  If you don't make it clear that this is
a requirement, why should they bother?

Jon

Received on Sunday, 11 August 1996 20:17:26 UTC