Message-Id: <9212040826.AA29173@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Fri, 4 Dec 92 09:25:10 +0100
From: rolf.lindgren@USIT.UIO.NO
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Who needs a ?charset primitive (was: structured comments)
Status: R


Giving the charset in structured comments or, even, as a macro in the
preamble isn't good enough.

Imagine somebody using fonts from lots of different font vendors. They may
have different encodings, contain different glyphs, etc. Like, for
instance, the difference between CM fonts and Adobe's PostScript fonts.

BTW - you may stumble now, and say "But CM fonts and PostScript fonts have
the same encoding!" This is not correct, Adobe's PostScript fonts contain
many more glyphs than the CM fonts, but dvi drivers for PostScript have a
tendency to pick out a limited amount of the glyphs in the font.

_Furthermore_, one may want to create fonts cointaining glyphs from
different fonts, and with a non-standard encoding. This is especially true
if one operates with Adobe's Expert font collection.

The only way I can conceive of to handle this is already present in TeX.

For each font family, create a macro that remaps the code set. Forget
latin1, latin1 is for programmers, not for typographical convenience.

So I'd create macros for

	\adoberoman % TeX CM ++
	\adobett    % TeX TT ++ (We want verbatim to work with adobe monospace)
	\cmroman    % TeX CM ++
	\cmtt	    % TeX TT ++
	\adobetextexptert % TeX CM + Expert ligatures + greek chars from
			  % Symbol, etc.

This would give me an opportunity to swith between CM and PS fonts in the
same document, and make typographically complex documents. They might be
hard to port tho, because you'd have to ship the vf fonts as well.

Then I migh define, say, Adobe Garamond as

	\newcommand{AGaramond}{
		\family{agaramond}
		\adobetextexpert
		\setlength{leadingfraction}{1.2}
			% compensate 20% for tall ascenders
			% Does there already exist a hook for this?
	}

       Rolf Lindgren           |       "The opinions expressed above are
       616 Bjerke Studentheim  |        not necessarily those of anyone"
       N-0589 OSLO 5           |           rolf.lindgren@usit.uio.no