"Giuseppe Ghibo'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> Hans Fredrik Nordhaug wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Thomas Esser wrote:
> >
> > Thx for info on Berry names
> >
> > [cut]
> > > > 2) Wouldn't it be better to use the ghostscript name to avoid any
> > > > confusion (and to make map files more portable - useful outside teTeX)?
> > >
> > > What does this mean "more portable"? We are speaking about file names
> > > and the "Berry names" are the most portable names (8.3 for these files
> > > and all lowercase; strict 7bit ASCII).
> So to speak, but why in 2001 A.D. we still have to do with old MSDOS
> 8+3 things? Currently every new system supports more than 8+3 characters
> in filename, from Windows, to Unix, to Amiga, Mac, etc.; also for ISO,
> which has Joliet, RockRidge, HSFS, etc. extension to have long file
> names. And all these systems supports at least 31 characters long file
> names, as well as for ISO CD images, which has Joliet, RockRidge, HSFS,
> etc. extension to have long file names.
There are still a lot of people around, particularly in the so-called
Third World, who are happily running TeX on ancient machines.
Earlier this year I installed emTeX on a 386sx machine with a 40MB
hard disk for my youngest daughter. She wanted to do her university
work on a machine which couldn't be used for playing games by her
children. She uses it solely for producing documents - and in even a
couple of months has learned enough about LaTeX not to want to even
try learning something which requires a machine with gigabytes of hard
disk space.
The following bit isn't directly relevant to font naming, but
indicates that old systems still have something going for them.
Even though I usually use teTeX under Linux on my home machine, I
recently discovered one case where the emTeX drivers are better than
dvips.
I was using xymtex to produce a diagram of part of an RNA molecule.
This uses nested picture environments to put the atoms in particuler
places and link them, and hence makes a lot of demands on memory.
Under teTeX dvips produced an error message "Out of stack space"
The emTeX drivers let me both view and print the diagram.
And on Stephanie's machine, with 8MB ram, it was slow but still
worked.
> How about a revision of the 8+3 KB naming scheme to support more
> characters for more prosaic font names? WDYT?
If a system isn't broken, don't fix it?
> Bye.
> Giuseppe.
Ken Smith
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
