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[bug #51362] [PATCH] add a synonym for the font "CW"


From: G. Branden Robinson
Subject: [bug #51362] [PATCH] add a synonym for the font "CW"
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2022 17:59:04 -0500 (EST)

Update of bug #51362 (project groff):

                 Summary: [PATCH]: Add a synonym for the font "CW" => [PATCH]
add a synonym for the font "CW"

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Follow-up Comment #6:

I think Ingo and I rejected this a little more strongly than we needed to.

I have found that there _is_ a scenario where one has to deal with fonts named
"CW" and in that event you'll have to deal with one named "CWI" as well, and
that is for coping with documents prepared for the old-school TeX font
repertoire.  I've done some small tweaks along these lines.

Apart from that, it's a bad idea.  AT&T Research Unix has some macros and
maybe even fonts named "CW" in the 1980s (we support a "CW" macro in groff
ms(7), for example), but since four styles of Courier were available even in
the original Adobe PostScript Type 1 set of 13 base fonts, also a product of
the 1980s, I don't see any reason to extrapolate CW/CWI handling outside of
areas where we need to make sure things work for the 'dvi' output device.

As an example of clumsy practice we should not bother to emulate, I give you a
quote from the "CHANGES_1993" file of Documenter's Workbench troff 3.3.

> 19: Copied CW to CB in the devpcl and devi300 font tables - so man pages
print without generating troff warnings about missing fonts.

Apparently "CW" was a synonym for "C", or what groff calls "CR".  1980s troff
seems to have only haltingly picked up the concept of font families.

groff adopted a better, more orthogonal approach early on, perhaps from day
one, and we shouldn't muddy those waters.

While I'm here I'll observe that DWB troff also adopted, or possibly copied
from AT&T Research Unix troff, a convention of using the letter "X" to
indicate the bold-italic style.  This was another bad idea that we should not
mollycoddle.


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