[Indigo]<Fonts>Memos>UniversityFonts.bravo!1

The July font cataclysm won’t have as much impact at the universities as it will at PARC, since the universities have been running with some version of the third generation fonts from the very beginning. But I am planning to take advantage of the cataclysm as a chance to give the universities a new and more complete release of fonts.

Besides adding new special characters in the third generation of fonts, Pellar has also broadened the scope of font sizes and faces that he is supporting. For example, the third generation release includes TimesRoman and Helvetica in 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 14 points in plain, bold, italic, and bold-italic, and 18 point in plain, bold, and italic. The 14 point fonts in particular should be popular for overhead transparencies and the like.

In addition to some new sizes of old fonts, I also plan to include several random fonts that were not included in the original release, but which the universities might like to have. If anyone has particular requests, please let me know. So far, in answer to requests from Stanford, I have the following comments. I will be glad to provide Sigma in 20; Logo in 24; Math and Hippo in 12, 14, and 18; Sail in 6 and 8; APL in 8 and 10; and Elite in 10. Cream is available in 10 and 12, in all four faces; I might as well include them all.

By the way, this font release will also include the vector drawing fonts that Carnegie-Mellon produced for use with the ReDraw program; this should make it easier for the other universities to get curves without jaggies out of their Dovers.

Unfortunately, the July cataclysm did not include any of the updates to the TEX fonts that I was originally planning on. It just seemed smarter to break the cataclysm into two parts, so as to get some part at least to happen as soon as possible.

When I have recovered from the July cataclysm, I will start working on generating new TEX fonts for CSL from Knuth’s latest Metafont sources. My current plan is to generate complete sets at magnifications of 1.0 and 1.1, and partial sets at several larger magnifications. When all of this is done, I will add make these new TEX fonts available to the universities as well, in still another font release. The universities will be able to save some work if they just pull and use the TEX fonts that I produce for PARC, rather than producing their own with Metafont. On the other hand, if you pull my fonts, you will be more or less forced to handle the logical and physical sizes of TEX fonts in the same way that I have chosen to do so. The right way to handle magnification in TEX and have the resulting Press files print on Dovers is a rather subtle thing to see. If you don’t like my plans as expressed in the TexFonts memo, or if you don’t understand them, then please bug me about them. I hope to start implementing my plan before too long, and plans are always easiest to change while they are still plans.

The university liasons do not have access to [Ivy], and hence cannot go to that source for Alto fonts. I have put the Alto fonts that you probably want onto the Maxc directories <AltoFonts> and <Printing>. Most of them are on <AltoFonts>, in fact. I only used <Printing> to solve the following problem: many people seem to be addicted to the Original-style Alto fonts for Helvetica and TimesRoman, rather than the new fonts that Ron Pellar has produced. Furthermore, they are used to finding the Original guys on <AltoFonts>. Thus, for the entire TimesRoman and Helvetica families, and in three other places where there were conflicts (Hippo12, Logo24, and Math10), I put the Pellar version on <Printing> and the Original version (if any) on <AltoFonts>. Since you are young at heart, flexible, and eager to press on to the future, I suggest that you go with the Pellar version wherever there is any choice. If, after reading the AltoFontGuide memo, you decide that you would like access to some other set of Alto fonts, super-thin ones for example, just let me know.

In any case, all of the Alto fonts are stored on Maxc1 in all three possible flavors: .AL, .KS, and .Strike. The .KS format, in case you are unaware, is a new strike format that allows characters to kern; see the KernedStrikes memo on [Maxc1]<Fonts>.

As font dictionaries get larger and larger, it will become more of a problem to have the university grant font dictionary sitting on Maxc1, eating up disk space. If the university liasons are willing, I would like to set up a scheme at some point whereby I could put these large files on Maxc1 and send out a message about it with the expectation that the universities would pull the file relatively promptly. When all university liasons had given me the word that they had the file safely in their grasp, I would delete the copy of Maxc1. In this way, we could use Maxc1 only as a temporary storage medium, a part of the transportation process.

Rumor has it that the universities have been having some difficulty with the discrepancies between the PARC character code conventions and those in use elsewhere. One small step in the right direction is being taken by the official third generation font release (although this feature may not have made it into the original font set that I sent the universities). In the new TimesRoman and Helvetica fonts, character code #140, which most of the world thinks of as left single quote but which used to be undefined in PARC fonts, now duplicates #7, which is the PARC standard for left single quote. Let’s here it for consistency and all that!