Message-ID:  <199704161522.QAA24308@vummath.ma.man.ac.uk>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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              (KNAPPEN@MZDMZA.ZDV.UNI-MAINZ.DE)
Date:         Wed, 16 Apr 1997 16:22:08 +0100
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@MA.MAN.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: Capital greek letters and the math font encoding
Status: R

> Currently it is possible and often applied practice, to use

> \( \mathit{\Gamma} \mathrm{\Gamma} \mathsf{\Gamma} \)

but that only works (with the current definition of \mathxx) because
the upper case Greek is in the text fonts. So it would not be
sufficient to make these variable family (ie letters) they would
really have to go back into the T1 encoding, which surely no one
wants. In particular the above does not work even now if using
anything other than cm as the text fonts, as no other fonts have
Greek, and normally fontinst choses not to attach Adobe symbol greek
onto a random text font and so these slots are empty.

It is possible to devise commands that take a command such as \Gamma
and then to typeset a symbol from a different family without relying
on the \fam mechanism. See for example \bm from bm.sty.
\bm{\Gamma} (and \bm{\gamma}) make bold letters but if suitable
fonts were available something similar could be done for other
style changes. So even with Gamma and friends being assigned to a
fixed family, one could still produce an interface to switching
and `for compatibility' that could (perhaps) even optionally be
hidden under a more complicated definition of \mathxx

David