On Mon, 5 Aug 2002 21:22:24 +0200, Frank Mittelbach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >no i'm saying that my understanding of his [Donald E. Knuth's] >intentions is that he wants to >ensure that within a TeX system (ie program plus surroundings) > > \font\foo=cmr10 > >refers to his CMR10 and > > \input plain > >to his plain.tex
I believe that the following quote from fontname.texi (author Karl Berry, de-TeXInfo-ified by me) makes the interpretation that he reserves the right to enforce this legally rather unlikely. >A fontname mapping file >======================= > >At the moment, most implementations of TeX look up a TFM file (as >part of the \font command), by searching for a file with the name >given by the user (possibly in any of series of directories). But >if we also looked TFM names up in *another* file (or set of files), >which specifies the actual filename, the fontname given in the TeX >source file could be almost anything at all, of any length. > >In version 5.851d of Web2c, I implemented this mapping file. Each >file texfonts.map in a search path is read for abbreviations. The >file has a straightforward format: each line specifies the filename >and the TeX name for one font, separated by whitespace. Extra >information on the line is ignored; then more information could be >specified for the benefit of DVI-reading programs in the same file. >Comments start with % and continue to the end of the line. > >Besides allowing long names, this sort of mapping file has other >benefits. TeX source or DVI files can be more easily transported, >because the font names in a particular file can be made work on >every system. Also, when combined with a consistent naming scheme, >macros could be written to access any of a number of fonts. Right >now, each font family has to have specialized macros written to >deal with it. (Background info for the Debianites: What Karl describes above could be useful with the font selection scheme set up by plain.tex, but I don't think it is used much these days. Instead the de facto standard is to use the New Font Selection Scheme, which is integrated with LaTeX2e but also exists in a version for use with PlainTeX.) >Incidentally, Professor Knuth has approved this as a legitimate >``system-dependent'' extension; a TeX with such a feature can still >be called ``TeX''. Hence if anyone was to add the line ptmr7t cmr10 to texfonts.map in a Web2C system (such as teTeX) then \font\foo=cmr10 would no longer load Knuth's cmr10. Apparently this does not contradict the trademark license on TeX (provided we can trust Karl Berry on this matter, but I think we can). Lars Hellström
