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Date:         Sun, 14 Nov 93 20:16:56 +0100
From: David_Rhead@VME.CCC.NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
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Subject:      NF prefix: interface for "ordinary user"?
Status: R


There's been a lot of discussion about the nf prefix.  E.g., from Donald
Arseneau:
     There is no "12pt.sty", but the LaTeX distribution supports the style
     "12pt".
     Since LaTeX now supports Postscript fonts, it should support styles
     "times", "helvetica", etc.  This has *nothing* to do with what the
     files are named.  In fact, to get the best compatibility between old
     and new LaTeX, the files should not be named "times.sty" etc.  so that
     old files with the same names won't get used accidentally.  The names
     "nftimes.sty" and "nfhelv.sty" sound reasonable.

Might it be better to aspire to getting references to fonts out of
\document...  commands altogether (in line with the "separate the role of
the document-designer from that of the author" philosophy)?  I.e.,
* as far as possible, avoid \document...[12pt]...  and avoid
  \document..[..times..]..  and avoid \document..[..helv..]...
* regard font things as document-designer things rather than as
  "ordinary user" things.
If this were done, the question of what things were called would matter
to document-designers, but not to ordinary users.

E.g., I liked the recently-released Elsevier Science Publishers 2.09 stuff.
The ordinary user goes
\doumentstyle{espart}
and gets a preprint design.  Perhaps, farther down the production line
there's a copy-edit design?  Then there will be a production design for a
particular journal.

In this "professional publishing" situation it might be natural to have
style-options for stages (not fonts), e.g.,
\document...[preprint]...  %  the default
\document...[copyedit]...
\document...[final]...
Quite likely, the preprint design will use 11pt or 12pt Computer Modern,
and the final design will use Times Roman.  But these are
"document-designer matters", not "ordinary user" matters.

To some extent, the amateur publisher (e.g., postgraduate doing thesis) is
aspiring to be "professional" anyway, so the above remarks may still apply.
In practice, the "maintainer of the University of X thesis-styles" might
give a choice of designs, from which the "ordinary user" can choose (like
choosing wallpaper).  The ordinary user might need to know whether the
design can be previewed by software that just "knows about" Computer
Modern, or whether software that "knows about" PostScript is needed.
(E.g., style-file display message saying "Preview this with GhostScript".)
But all other details can be hidden.  I.e., I think "the maintainer" would
be better hiding references to [nf]times.sty (if the design needs them)
from "the ordinary user", rather than telling "the ordinary user" to put
[nf]times.sty in a \document...  command.

Rather than to spend a lot of time worrying about how font-specifications
should be named in a \document...  command, mightn't it be better to aspire
to getting font-specifications out of \document...  commands as far as
possible (so that their names don't matter to "the ordinary user" anyway)?

                                                                David Rhead