Font proposal

[Matej Cepl]

Hi,

thinking about new font definitions, I have got a idea (not very 
original) about another possible structure of font names. What 
strucks me most is the question, why there are different font names 
for different languages necessary at all? After all, @Language 
symbol is supposed to carry exactly the same information as CE  
suffix.

Why not to make it similarily as it is done in Windows95 and above, 
where you have only one TimesNewRoman font for all languages 
(even with azbuka, which seems to me stupid -- Uwe, what is a 
common denomnator in the shape of the glyphs between the latin 
characters and cyrilic ones?) and you need only to switch languages 
to get correct glyphs. I know, there is Unicode somewhere beneath  
all the stuff (although not necessarily), but why not to make some 
kind aliases possible. So I would have something like

{ @FontDef
    @Tag { AvantGardeCE-Base } # if necessary to have
                                                                  # unambiguous 
label
    @Family { AvantGarde }
    @Face { Base }
    @Name { AvantGarde-Medium }
    @Metrics { AG-Md }
    @ExtraMetrics { AG-Md+ }
    @Mapping { LtLatin2.LCM }
}

The benefit of this construct is obvious, I suppose: number of local 
setups could be drastically reduced, because I would not have to 
keep two separate version of slides (for example), just because I 
need to set up @TitlePageFont to local version of Helvetica.

This idea seems to me so obvious, that I have probably overlooked 
something. What's wrong with it?

                        Have a nice day

                                                                Matej Cepl