» i'm not sure i agree on the split for the series attribute. and it doesn't
» really origins in the CM history --- it does origin in "Methods of Book
» design" by Hugh Wiliamson.

interesting info, thanks. i stand corrected.

» one idea with the axis' or attributes was that it should be desirable (and
» sensible) to change individual attributes while retaining al others. Now i
» claim that there is not much argument for changing individually width but
» retaining weight or the other way around

That's a point.  Here is a (maybe bad--tell me) counterexample: I
define an abstract environment as a noarrower column using some narrow
sansserif font. Within this environment, I want to be able to typeset
anything that could be in the text, including weight variants. Another
similar use: in a bilingual (?)  document, i keep the translation in a
narrow version of the font, everything else affected by the same font
variations. Well, yes : my examples could be easily treated by
declaring a xx-narrow family, rather than having width & weight
separated. My problem is on the practical/genericity of the markup
side. something like \fontfamily{\f@family n} is, i believe, very
fragile.


I see that your
» i mean proper classes (not a generic one like article et al) can't cater for
» more than a single font set anyway, can it?

breaks my argument as well...

Thierry Bouche, Grenoble.