[777] in testers
the good old fnots
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed May 16 19:06:48 1990
Date: Wed, 16 May 90 19:06:21 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: dryfoo@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: testers@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: dryfoo@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Wed, 16 May 90 18:06:34 EDT <9005162206.AA00564@BEETHOVEN.MIT.EDU>
From: dryfoo@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 16 May 90 18:06:34 EDT
Is there anyway to get use of some of them? In particular, there were a
couple of cyrillic (Russian) fonts, and a very tiny one called "micro",
and a few others that I found useful. Did we just throw away all access
to them?
Well, that's what we were planning on doing. The whole reason they
were moved into the "old" subdirectory in the first place is that they
are no longer supported by the X Consortium, and since the Consortium
is our "vendor" for X, they are no longer supported by us. They were
kept at all only to give people a chance to fix applications that use
them.
However, they will remain available in the OldXFonts filesystem.
Attach OldXFonts, and then do "xset fp+ /mit/OldXFonts/". This
directory isn't completely set up yet -- the fonts are there, but
their names aren't quite set up properly yet, so you'll have to use
somewhat strange names to get to some of them (for some of them, that
means putting ".bdf" on the end of the name, for others, it means
adding a strange path to the beginning and end of the font name,
etc.).
Please keep in mind that the whole reason it's becoming more difficult
to get to those fonts is that we really don't want people using them.
I can't help you with the Russian fonts, because I don't think there
are any in X11r4, but with reference to "micro", you might want to
take a look at the 5x8 and nil2 fonts.
If so, aw heck, that's life around here. But losing somethin fun and
useful because no one wants to install it into the new&improved world is
always a loss.
Despite how you may think that we make release decisions here at
Project Athena, the fact of the matter is that we give such decisions
careful consideration. You should know that, if you're read the
release 6.2A release notes, which document why we originally moved the
fonts into the "old" subdirectory and took them out of all the
standard font paths. From those release notes:
In all releases of X to date, there has been no standard,
systematically collected set of available fonts. With X11R3,
the arbitrary collection of fonts available in earlier
releases has been replaced with a much more complete and
regular set of fonts, contributed jointly by Adobe Systems and
Digital. In addition, the names of these contributed fonts
have all been made to conform to the new font-naming
conventions.
...
You can still use the old fonts (i.e., those previously
available at Athena) if you want, but it will require explicit
action to make them work for you. This should help motivate
developers to actively fix applications that depend on
non-standard names, particularly applications that have
hard-coded font names.
In other words, "Use the fonts at your own risk."
jik
