Re: Hello from GNU Press

[Karl Berry]

    Some PostScript fonts may not have
    the same bolds and obliques and such, right?

Everything has bold.  You're right that some fonts have oblique and not
italic, and that should be handled by the system.

    some simple method of specifying the default Roman font as foo, 

The @fontsize and @fontdef commands are only needed if someone wants to
override the defaults for some crazy reason.  I guess I didn't make it
clear in my example that the basic idea was that only the @fontfamily
commands would generally need to be specified in the document.

I don't think `ps' or `mf' actually has to be an argument.  We'll see.

    because most of them default to 7pt, so we'd have to recalculate
    everything.

Really?  That's not my experience.  But it doesn't matter, seems better
to allow both scaled... and at... anyway.

    (Well, you may have to ask for your current font again.)

The code should reselect the current fonts when a font command is run.

            OK.  So we merely have to pick the right suffix.  How is that
    handled right now?  I didn't see any explicit code to pick up suffixes.

There are no suffixes right now :).  For the first stage, we can skip that.
`ptmr' by itself is ok.

Good luck with the paragraph indentation stuff, let me/us know if we can
help.

    P.S.  Do you know who Joshua Gay is?  I heard that he did some work in
          this area for GNU Press, but haven't found evidence of it.

I received some mail from him last June and July in which he said he
wouldn't be at the FSF after summer 2002, I'll send it to you separately
FWIW.  Lisa Goldstein worked with (hired, I would guess) him.


Personally, I must confess, I am somewhat skeptical that sales of GNU
books will increase because they are typeset in
<fill-in-favorite-typeface-name> instead of Computer Modern.  There are
reasons to use other fonts, but that seems a dubious one to me.  Anyway ...

k