X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["1764" "Sun" "7" "March" "93" "16:34:03" "+0100" "rolf.lindgren@USIT.UIO.NO" "rolf.lindgren@USIT.UIO.NO" nil "38" "Fonts and LaTeX 3" "^Date:" nil nil "3"]) Return-Path: Received: from sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (mailserv) by dagobert.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.1/SMI-4.0/1.9.92 ) id AA12203; Sun, 7 Mar 93 16:36:26 +0100 Received: from vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (vm.hd-net.uni-heidelberg.de) by sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.1/SMI-4.0-sc/19.6.92) id AA02424; Sun, 7 Mar 93 16:36:16 +0100 Message-Id: <9303071536.AA02424@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de> Received: from DHDURZ1 by vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 2823; Sun, 07 Mar 93 16:36:33 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 2448; Sun, 07 Mar 93 16:36:30 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 2446; Sun, 07 Mar 93 16:36:27 CET Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Date: Sun, 7 Mar 93 16:34:03 +0100 From: rolf.lindgren@USIT.UIO.NO Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple Recipients of Subject: Fonts and LaTeX 3 Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 996 I've been trying to come to grips with the problems of font use and abuse both in typography in general, and implementing various fonts in LaTeX. I see a few things that I'd like LaTeX 3 to be able to to which would make all of this easier. First, just substituting one font for another (as with D. M. Jones' PS font package) isn't really good enough, because different x heights reqire different baselines. My point is, simply saying \family{somefont}\selectfont isn't good enough because the leading is still prepared for cmr. Sometimes I'd like to keep cmtt (or, indeed, cmsf) and only replace cmr with a PS font. But this requires some work because font encoding between MF fonts and PS fonts normally differ slightly. So I'd like commands to switch between different font encodings. I'd like to be able to turn _off_ ligatures at large point sizes because ligatures look to cramped. But this can't be done from a macro unfortunately, you'd have to have to build tfm's for different point sizes. A solution to some of this is to write a program, say, xfm2sty, that takes a font metric file (or a bunch of metric files of the same font family) and writes a macro that contains commands to manipulate fonts. Say, Adobe Garamond gives rise to a macro \AdobeGaramond that switches to Adobe Garamond Regular at \family{garamond}\selectfont\rm, SemiBold at \bf, etc. The command \AdobeGaramond would set appropriate baselines, correct mapping between input and output character encoding (to do this, it might have to read tfm files as well ... sigh). Such a beast should be able to read not only PS fonts, but also HP softfonts I suppose, and be able to recognize Mac and Latin1 input encoding as well as the IBM codepages. Does this sound too far-fetched?