[sw-l] Downloading the IMWA and SSS-1999

[Sandy Fleming]

Trevor wrote:

> Nothing wrong in that. ;-) One would expect it to grow as the notation
> develops. What it does need is for applications such as Stephen's to have
> an efficent storage method. If the elements of the IMWA is stored as
> individual files then the user loses a whole bunch of disk space
> unecessarily.

Yes, one way would be to store it a zip file and let the program extract
from in as it needs them. The program would work more slowly because it has
to do the extraction, but it would only have to extract once per gif/png so
it's not bad at all - with good programming, it would work well. It's still
an awful lot to ask a user to download for his distribution however. The
reason Stephen can use the full IMWA is that it's a Web-based application so
he doesn't have to ask the user to download the whole IMWA - it's stored on
the server for them.

Another solution is to store the components of the symbols rather than the
whole symbol. Then we can have rules for creating symbols from the
components.

Val's solution of having an IMWA subset for each language is still probably
the best. A programmer can always opt to improve on this by storing symbol
components from his subset instead of whole symbols if he wants.

Ultimately I think the answer is in fonts, although there are also
distribution problems with large fonts!

Sandy