Re: psnfss and lw35nfss

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

I downloaded the psnfss-beta package and played about with it and
found the following...

  - famtool.pl tries to invoke something called `cs', which failed on my
    system -- cs does not seem to be a standard part of Unix (I checked
    NEXTSTEP and Solaris) or teTeX 0.4.

  - I don't understand why fonts like Times Roman get special treatment 
    in this setup. For example, Narrow and Extended versions of Times
    Roman and Platino Roman are created, but no Narrow and Extended
    versions of New Century Schoolbook or Bookman. Similarly (and
    possibly less importantly?), we only have a mathptm package, and
    no mathppl, mathpnc or mathpbk.  In my opinion, Times Roman is
    at least as over-exposed as Computer Modern, and so having to
    use it to get some features doesn't seem right.

    Also, the Narrow and Extended versions even for Times are just
    made for the Roman set. Having a Bold Extended version seems like
    it might be very nice. (And possibly doing the all the series
    including Itialic in Narrow and Extended would make sense).

  - I'd love to see something explaining the naming conventions used
    for fonts. I'm sure there probably is something somewhere on CTAN
    but I couldn't make anything appropriate out in this distribution.
    For example, why is Helvetica-Narrow phvr8rn and not phvrn8r?

  - Naming Perl scripts '.pl' can be a bit confusing since '.pl' is used
    by the very scripts themselves to refer to property list files.

Anyway, these are just my initial thoughts...   Opinions welcome...

    Melissa.