X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil]
	[nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil])
Date:         Wed, 27 Jun 90 10:31:00 PDT
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.bitnet>
Subject:      Re: Font mappings
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 143

Speaking as the person who most likely put the idea of this stuff
into Frank's head, let me explain why I wanted it.

Case one: The Merganthaler fonts supplied by Xerox have a
character set which lacks all accentuation as well as a great
number of characters. The non-VF manner of dealing with this
problem is to issue the command \meracc after switching to any of
the families of the Xerox Merganthaler set. Now, the way I've been
using the new font selection scheme has been to either (a)
globally change \rmdefault and \default@family to set the whole
document in another font or (b) in various document structures,
doing, e.g., \def\rmdefault{cs}\bf to select boldface Century
Schoolbook for the chapter headers. (btw, I am a fervent believer
that the facilities provided by newlfont.sty, while they are nice,
are _not_ a replacement for the old way of selecting fonts.
Provide those facilities, but not under the names \rm, \bf, \it,
etc.) Now why not simply do \meracc\def\rmdefault etc.? Well, I
would like to make it a fairly trivial exercise for the author to
switch between, say, PS versions of Times, Helvetica, Century
Schoolbook, and Optima, Xerox Merganthaler versions of those
fonts, and Compugraphic versions. Each of these may require a bit
of extra setup which is different. Since this setup is logically
tied to the family, I think that the other code should be tied up
to the family as well.

What about virtual fonts? They can certainly be used to relocate
accents out of other fonts and the like so that that part can be
handled more easily but I won't consider them the final solution
until somebody can show me how one allows TeX's \AA command to
access the A-circle character from ISO 8859/1 (character x'C5)
without changing the definition of \AA.

Case two: Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. These need extra setup no
matter how you try to deal with them. The extradefs for Greek, for
example, might include definitions to select the proper
hyphenations and set up the active characters necessary for Greek.

-dh