Message-Id: <9303091543.AA07026@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
In-Reply-To:  <"alf.uib.no.846:09.02.93.08.33.18"@uib.no>
Date:         Tue, 9 Mar 93 16:41:17 +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:      Re: Fonts and LaTeX 3
Status: R


Malcolm Clark writes:
 > good to see the postscript wars bubbling up again.
 > just how many angels can you get on the pinhead this time?
 >

How many angels you can get on a pinhead depends on how much they like
each other.

An easy way around the PS wars is to decide that we forget about PCL and
PS and let the device driver people decide what to support. The question
about how flexible font managment should be, however, can be viewed as a
matter of how many different pk font families you want to merge into one
document. You get the same kind of problems as with PS and PCL fonts.
Point is that HP softfonts and PS are both part of the world, and provide
possibilities that LaTeX 3 should not place restrictions upon.

x heights provide some heuristics as to leading, of course the document
designer has to have the option to override whichever heuristic a font
option decides.

Leading should be specified according to the base font of the document. If
you use several font on one line, you don't change leading. That's one of
the reasons why, in mixing fonts, it's wise to use fonts of about the same
x height, or the same x height/X height ratio and then do some scaling of
the additional font. (I hate it when PS style files scale the point size
to fit the x height of the cm math fonts. It's the cm math fonts that
should be scaled. I'd like to have LaTeX 3 provide a way to scale the math
fonts for the benefit of those of us who use scalable (e.g. PS) math fonts.)

One thing that I've quite forgotten - some characters are
built as macros and don't get substitued with real glyphs automatically
when another font is used, like \ldots which you have to _know_ to
substitute with a proper ellipsis if the chosen font supports it. It's
curently all a matter of hacking lfonts.tex, but I'd like it to be made
more convenient to change the definitions of which macros expand to what
characters according to whether the chosen font supports it or not. This,
I suppose, might be brought about by a properly constructed encoding
macro if it knows what characters a DC font can be assumed to have, what
characters the current cm fonts have, what characters HP softfonts have,
etc. (Just for this reason it's good if LaTeX 3 designers know a little
about the standards that exist).

 > malcolm

-roffe
rolf.lindgren@usit.uio.no