DR 09-0057 - PML, Presentation: Allow aliases as values for attribute typeface

[Shawn Villaron]

This is in regards to the JP defect report.

So this is not so much a defect report but rather a feature request.  I think we need to consider whether or not we're going to use defect reports to add functionality to the standard.

I can say that the design of fonts in presentations was not intended to include a list of alternative fonts ( so called "aliases" ).  So this was not an omission in documentation.

That said, I'm not against this suggested improvement.  But I'm not sure that the recommended approach is the correct one.  In the submission, the recommendation is made to allow the typeface attribute on the font element to specify alternative fonts.  I don't believe this is the correct approach as this would break existing implementations which use this attribute ( that is, the implementations would be expecting one typeface in the value and not be prepared to parse out multiple entries from a single string ).  So I firmly believe we should not take this approach.

There are other approaches we could take.  We could consider adding an optional attribute to the font element ( altName? ) and have that specify a comma-delimited list of alternative font.  We could also consider adding an optional child element to do the same thing.

Bottom line, I think we need to decide on our engineering approach to this problem, if we believe we should add this support, and if we believe it should be done via a defect report.  Hopefully we can discuss this in Stockholm next week.

Thanks,

shawn
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