I wrote up the font/charset stuff in the annual report

[Ron Kaplan]

Maybe too much detail, but there it is. Have at it.

I didn't include anything about Tedit. From the TEdit release notes for 2025 I think I would only mention the new architecture for action-character keybindings (including arrows in Tedit and Sketch) and keeping the color property,

[Paolo Amoroso]

As discussed in the January 7, 2026 external meeting Ron and Bill edited some portions of the 2025 annual report draft: Ron rewrote section Work on the Core Medley System and Bill section Credits. As Ron suggested I slightly changed the second paragraph of section Work on the Core Medley System to mention the new architecture for action-character keybindings and the color property.

With these changes the draft is more or less complete and ready for further rounds of editing and refining.

On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 10:56 PM Ron Kaplan <ron.k...@post.harvard.edu> wrote:

Maybe too much detail, but there it is.  Have at it.

I didn't include anything about Tedit.  From the TEdit release notes for 2025 I think I would only mention the new architecture for action-character keybindings (including arrows in Tedit and Sketch) and keeping the color property,

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[Paolo Amoroso]

I forgot to mention that Ron's rewrite of section Work on the Core Medley System made section Enhanced Interoperability unnecessary, so I'll go ahead and delete the latter.

[Paolo Amoroso]

Ron: Herb proposed a shorter version of your rewrite of section Work on the Core Medley System which you should be able to see in the document. But since the material is valuable, before proceeding with the change I'm copying it below so that it gets preserved and may be used elsewhere, such as in the documentation of your work on fonts and encodings.

--- Ron's text ---

In a major effort during this year we addressed some significant shortcomings and inconsistencies in Medley’s legacy font and character-encoding architectures.  In its early implementation, in the late 1970s, Interlisp-D incorporated the font and character technologies that had been developed for the Xerox Alto.  Xerox subsequently developed the multilingual Xerox Character Coding Standard (XCCS, a precursor to Unicode), and XCCS together with a collection of compatible fonts were also layered into Interlisp. The result has been serviceable but not satisfactory:  the appearance of a character code in a string or on a file, for example, depended on which font happened to be installed when that code was rendered on the display or printed

In 2025 we freed ourselves from previous font and character constraints by defining the Medley Character Code Standard (MCCS).  MCCS conforms mostly to XCCS but some of its codes are carried over from the Alto assignments.  Of importance, defining a separate standard also makes clear that we are no longer limited to just the character definitions of the now-frozen Xerox standard.  The basic font architecture was also revised so that character-code mappings of all our pre-existing fonts could be modified to conform to the new standard.  The result is that there is now a consistent font-independent rendering of every character code.

As part of the font recoding effort we created a new “Medleyfont” file-format to give us better control over the reading and writing of font-metric information. In another significant effort, we were then able to extract the metric and glyph-bitmaps from externally available BDF fonts, write them in Medleyfont files, and easily make them available under the new architecture, either to fill in missing character information in our existing fonts, or to install new fonts that comport well with external standards.  

In a separate effort, we created an HTML stream in Medley’s device-independent graphics (DIG) framework that enables Medley’s generic display operations to directly produce HTML files for display in desktop browser windows. TEdit streams, for example, can be “hardcopied” not only to Postscript and PDF files, but also now to HTML files.  The printing architecture was revised and a new WINDOW printer was introduced so that files can be sent to desktop windows by specifying the window “printer” device as the target for the SEND.FILE.TO.PRINTER primitive function.

--- Ron's text ---

[Herb Jellinek]

To be more clear than I apparently was in my comments, I came up with that slightly shorter version, then had second thoughts: even that version is so much more detailed than any of the surrounding text that it would stand out.

I favor including in the annual report a much higher-level synopsis of what you wrote, and putting the details somewhere where it will be preserved and likely to be found by project members who will need to refer to it. (The last place I would think to look for details of the implementation of a subsystem would be in the annual report! But maybe that's just me.)

- Herb

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Sent from a phone; please excuse weird autocorrect mustard

[Ron Kaplan]

At least from what I saw, the changes are fine but didn't seem to make it much shorter.  I'm OK with a brief synopsis.  Could be 2 or 3 sentences:  we inherited a problem, we addressed it by defining our own new character code standard, revised the font architecture to make all existing fonts consistent with the new standard and to make it easier to integrate font information from modern external sources.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/B823F1A1-4897-4294-8590-443A269A3817%40newscenter.com.

[Herb Jellinek]

My version was 30% shorter, but still too long.  I volunteer to edit it down, but first I need to know where can we preserve the valuable detail in your original version?  Is there a design doc that would provide a suitable home, for instance?

                Herb

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/D1B81366-7435-400D-BE3F-23799842550E%40post.harvard.edu.

[Ron Kaplan]

I think there are documentation files for the fontcode changes, MCCS, and Medleyfonts in docs/internal/.  Maybe some of this could be added as motivation or overview.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/6ee77200-7072-467d-b628-d6fcdd0de99d%40newscenter.com.

[Herb Jellinek]

I created a new file in <docs>internal>, MEDLEYFONTRATIONALE.tedit, to hold Ron's overview and point to the three related doc files.  I pushed it to rmk126--HARDCOPY-to-printers.  See https://github.com/Interlisp/medley/pull/2290/commits/ee0e46cdcaa8b9101ee0016cf2c0587535997d0f.  Thanks for writing that, Ron.

The annual report now contains a brief-but-not-too-brief synopsis.

            Herb

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/867B0540-5745-4168-8310-704AC3E36700%40post.harvard.edu.

[Paolo Amoroso]

Concerning the ordering of topics, after the overview the draft proceeds with community outreach but I think it would be better to discuss the work on the Medley system first. So I'd swap the section "Community Outreach" with "Work on the Core Medley System".

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/67c25521-8ab4-4407-aab2-97fb2cb0bbf6%40newscenter.com.