Message-Id: <199403111610.AA23018@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Fri, 11 Mar 1994 17:07:42 +0100
From: Peter Dalgaard SFE <pd@KUBISM.KU.DK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: AMS-LaTeX 1.1 patch for LaTeX2e
Status: R

> peter dalgaard asks if ams-latex 1.2 will support dc fonts (t1
> encoding).
>
> because the purpose of ams-latex is to set mathematical material,
> it doesn't make a lot of sense to implement a font system that
> doesn't yet provide appropriate math fonts.  also, ams has a policy
> of accepting submissions prepared in ams-latex, and because of the
> absence of compatible math fonts, or even compatible text fonts for
> the hardware being used, would not be able to process -- in a
> production environment -- submissions utilizing dc fonts.
> for those reasons, i don't believe that version 1.2 will provide
> a native implementation of the dc fonts.

I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to continue this discussion here,
but it seems that the T1 encoding and math fonts issue is important
not just for AMS-LaTeX. A few basic issues

- The DC encoded fonts are currently the only way to get hyphenation to
  work in languages with accented characters without modifying TeX itself.

- The DC fonts not only adds characters above 128, but shuffles those below
  32 around as well. This causes the occasional problem with \mathchardef's
  in .sty files and so on.

- Apart from that, there is NO problem with mixing DC fonts with the good
  ol' math fonts from the CM and AMS series.

What annoys me is that people seem to believe that it is necessary to have
256-char math fonts before DC fonts can be used for anything except plain
text. This simply isn't true, and it confuses me that no-one in Germany
or France seem to have noticed (German and French has the hyphenation
problem much worse that Danish, which has only a single accented letter).

Sorry if I sound P'ed off, but the implication of the matter is that I
feel left with the options of either having to do some of my usual
nonstandard, half-assed hacking in order to get a decent environment for
typing mathematical papers in my natural language or postponing the
installation of LaTeX2e into the indefinite future. I can imagine a rather
large number of sysadmins being put in a similar dilemma.

BTW. I also don't understand why nobody seems to have found it worthwhile
to create a set of .vf files implementing the T1 encoding with CM glyphs.
(Can't be done perfectly, of course, since not all glyphs are there) With
these in place, it would be possible to process and print papers without
any additional fonts at all.

        Peter Dalgaard