Re: Character styles

["Daniel L. Weinreb" <DLW@alderaan.scrc.symbolics.com>]

The issue of "corresponding" screen and hardcopy fonts is something
we've spent a lot of time discussing and working on for a long time.
For a variety of reasons, it is far more difficult technically and
practically than it sounds.  I'd rather not try to go into all the
issues here; I'm not one of the experts in this area, and I'd probably
make mistakes.  All I can say is that a lot of people at Symbolics would
like it as much as you would, and we've put a lot of effort into it.

About all the other problems you threw into your message: I'm not a
printer expert, so I can't answer them.  Have you asked Symbolics
software support?  They can handle this kind of message, consulting the
relevant developer if necessary, and give you an accurate response.  I
can't do that myself.

There's one thing I believe I can answer: "Why not AppleTalk?"  Were
you, by any chance, at the last national SLUG meeting (in Washington)?
Steve Sneddon, head of our network group, gave a talk about the network
protocol situation, and tried to elicit feedback from the members about
the demand for support for SNA, NFS, X.25, MAP, ISDN, ISO, and various
other new standard protocols, as well as for various changes to
protocols that we do support.  There is an unfortunate plethora of
network protocols out there, and it's quite a bit of work to support any
one of them, since protocols are often elaborate and debugging is quite
hard due to the asynchronous nature of things.  Symbolics is trying hard
to support networking standards, but can't get to all of them at once,
and so we have to choose based on our best knowledge of overall
priority.  Even though we're using printers from Apple, we're still
inundated with high-priority demands for network developers, to fix and
improve the existing software, and support many new protocols.  There
may be other factors that I don't know about; I'm not in the networking
group.

I also know that there are going to be a lot of improvements in the
hardcopy software in Release 7.1.  I honestly don't know the details,
but I know a lot of time and effort was spent on it.  I hope that it
includes some of what you're talking about.

I'm speaking for myself, not for Symbolics; please don't take any of the
above as being official.  I thought you, and the other people on the
list, might prefer an unofficial, personal answer to no answer at all.
Please do send problems to software support, though, since they can
provide much better service than informal conversations on SLUG.