Re: Recognition of font families

On Jul 4, 11:25am, Gayle Kidder wrote:

> You can see it all on this demo page:
> http://www.beachmedia.com/www/families.html
> (Set your default font preference to something ridiculous, like Ransom
> Paste or Old English and the failures will stand out easily.)

Thanks. Here are some screenshots on NS4.01b6 (SGI)
  http://www.w3.org/people/chris/Style/ns401b6-genericfont.jpg
and NS4.01 (Mac)
  http://www.w3.org/people/chris/Style/ns401mac-genericfont.jpg

The JPEG compression messes up the finer detail of the fonts but
it's enough to see what happens.

> In a techno-philosophical sense, I'd like to know what exactly fonts
> "know" about themselves. Are (or should) digital font descriptions be
> written in such a way as to include the generic family?

They can contain information of this sort, depending on the font format.
There is a bunch of this stuff in Panose, for example, which can be made
available in the OS/2 table.

> Should they also
> know what more general family style (like Old Style or Classic) that
> they belong to?

There are some tables in truetype which say that a particular font
has, say, Clarendon serifs. Again it depends on the format and it
depends on what information the font designer chooses to include.



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 4 July 1997 20:24:14 UTC