> The original intent of Matthew Dillon i think was to be able to
> blindly use the `.so' request and make it work regardless of wether
> whatever file is compressed or not.
Why would you ever want this? TeX doesn't have this either, and up to
now I've never seen a request for adding this.
> Moreover, some files you simply don't need that often; a Unicode
> font in the format that groff(1) understands can well be over 40
> megabytes, which can be boiled down to less than the half of that.
Here I agree: groff font files are extremely verbose. But compression
is not the right solution, I think: you should rather implement a
better font format. And for the grops front-end, support for modern,
compact font formats like CFF or TFF should be implemented.
Werner
