Hello, all--

I am trying to decide on a data structure that allows efficient lookup
of fonts according to various font properties. I am thinking that the
data structures describing fonts will be something like this:


  type font_weight =
    | Medium
    | Bold
    | Light
  type font_style =
    | Roman
    | Italic
    | Oblique
  type font_width =
    | Normal
    | Expanded
    | Condensed
  type encoding = string * int     (* e.g. : ("iso8859",15))
  type font_ref = string       (* reference to the font file *)
  
  type font_family =
    ((font_weight * font_style * font_width * encoding) * font_ref) 
    list

  (* Example font family *)
  let arial = [
    ((Medium, Roman, Normal, ("iso10646",1)), "arial.ttf");
    ((Bold, Roman, Normal, ("iso10646",1)), "arialb.ttf");
    ...
    ];;

  (* based on the 5 types used in CSS and other Web standards *)
  type font_class =
    | Serif           
    | SansSerif
    | Monospaced
    | Cursive
    | Fantasy


What I would like to have is a data structure that contains descriptions
of all fonts available on a particular system, such that an application
can do something like:

  get_font_by_class ~weight:Bold ~style:Italic ~encoding:("iso8859",1) SansSerif

or

  get_font_by_family  ~weight:Bold "Helvetica"

And obtain the font file name that matches the specified
characteristics. As I mentioned above, efficient lookup is important;
efficient creation of the data structure is probably not important; and
since there are no large objects involved, and the data refers to font
collections that may have hundreds of members, but probably not
thousands, I don't think memory usage is really an issue.

So, does anyone have an idea what sort of data structure would work
best?

TIA for your suggestions.
    

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee@havenrock.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)

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