X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["1975" "Fri" "18" "April" "1997" "14:20:40" "+0200" "Hans Aberg" "haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE" nil "49" "Re: Alternatives to LaTeX" "^Date:" nil nil "4" nil nil nil nil nil] nil) Received: from listserv.gmd.de (listserv.gmd.de [192.88.97.1]) by mail.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.5/8.8.4) with ESMTP id OAA01438; Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:20:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from listserv.gmd.de by listserv.gmd.de (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.28A5D9E9@listserv.gmd.de>; Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:20:41 +0200 Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 127221 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:20:35 +0200 Received: from mail.nada.kth.se (root@mail.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.92]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.7.6/8.7.4) with ESMTP id OAA14776 for ; Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:20:33 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.109] (sl50.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.70]) by mail.nada.kth.se (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id OAA07067; Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:20:22 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:20:40 +0200 From: Hans Aberg Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Subject: Re: Alternatives to LaTeX Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 1994 At 11:31 97-04-18, Robin Fairbairns wrote: > Hans Aberg writes: >Suppose you have a type1 font that offers all the glyphs you need. >What is the (efficiency) advantage to making a composite virtual font, >rather than simply using what you've got? In my experience (almost >exclusively typesetting Latin-script text) the automatically-generated >8r encoding of type1 gives me all I need. > >In such a case, it's a ludicrous *waste* of effort to create a new >virtual font: unless you're wandering into typesetting of languages >that aren't covered by 8r, to do such a thing would be ridiculously >*in*efficient. I have all the time spoken about the math fints issue, where you always tend to run out of symbols. Are you discussing the text fonts all the time? :-) >Michael Downes remarked that linear scaling is bad when the sizes get >really small, which only really happens in maths; you then responded >that we need a "bit of work" to add meta-ness to the existing fonts, >and I responded to suggest that the "bit" was more likely to involve >armies of designers and metafont hackers. I knew intuitively that optical scaling is important in math, especially for all those scriptsscripts, which it is really nice if you can use without restriction in a math paper. Michael Downes made this precise, by remarking, in effect, that it makes only a difference for those scriptscripts (if your paper is in 10 pt); otherwise not. It makes any difference, I did not know this, so I fekt it was very interesting information myself. >> In fact there seems to be two wholly different discussion topics going on >> here: > >I.e., you actually _knew_ all the above... In general, I try to avoid polemics, so even if I put up some stuff, and somebody would misunderstand what I try to say, and puts up a polemic "correction", I would normally not bother following up on that. :-) Basically it is what facts come up in the end, that is important. Hans Aberg