At 10:12 23-05-2001 -0700, Tom Gewecke wrote:
>To me it seems basically administrative. One big font means I don't
>have to make sure I have all the "necessary" (the definition of which
>could change over time) members of the "suite" installed on my personal
>machine or on every machine in the lab or library.
I guess it's all relative. One big font also means you have to fit it
on one hard drive, no matter how large the font may grow. And, of course,
if you use standard, italic, bold, etc versions, you need to repeat
everything in all of them even if for those glyphs in which italic
is the same as standard.
Using a metafont means you can spread the smaller fonts on different
drives (or even over the network), and that you do not need to use up
your disk space for characters you do not need.
And updating just your Tibetan font means you only need to replace
a small font.
Furthermore, adding future extensions only means you need to add another
font anyowhere on your system, and add it to the text of your metafont
(which can be done by install software for you).
Either approach (one big font, or a number of small fonts and a metafont)
has its advantages and disadvantages. Nor do we have to choose one or
the other: For example, software can be written to compile a big font
from the collection of the fonts listed in a metafont. And vice versa.
Cheers,
Adam
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