File: FAQ-fontname.html

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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label fontname</title>
</head><body>
<h3>What is the &ldquo;Berry naming scheme&rdquo;</h3>
<p>In the olden days, (La)TeX distributions were limited by the
feebleness of file systems&rsquo; ability to represent long names.  (The
MSDOS file system was a particular bugbear: fortunately any current
Microsoft system allows rather more freedom to specify file names.
Sadly, the ISO 9660 standard for the structure of CDROMs has a
similar failing, but that too has been modified by various extension
mechanisms.)
<p>One area in which this was a particular problem was that of file names
for Type 1 fonts.  These fonts are distributed by their vendors with
pretty meaningless short names, and there&rsquo;s a natural ambition to
change the name to something that identifies the font somewhat
precisely.  Unfortunately, names such as &ldquo;BaskervilleMT&rdquo; are
already far beyond the abilities of the typical feeble file system,
and add the specifier of a font shape or variant, and the difficulties
spiral out of control.
<p>Thus arose the Berry naming scheme.
<p>The basis of the scheme is to encode the meanings of the various parts
of the file&rsquo;s specification in an extremely terse way, so that enough
font names can be expressed even in impoverished file spaces.  The
encoding allocates one letter to the font &ldquo;foundry&rdquo;, two to the
typeface name, one to the weight, and so on.  The whole scheme is
outlined in the <i>fontname</i> distribution, which includes
extensive documentation and a set of tables of fonts whose names have
been systematised.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>fontname distribution</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/fontname.zip">info/fontname</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/fontname.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/fontname/">browse</a>)
</dl>
<p>
<p><p><p><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=fontname">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=fontname</a>
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