Message-ID:  <199911191057.LAA00355@murnau.idris.fr>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Fri, 19 Nov 1999 11:57:40 +0100
From: Bernard GAULLE <gaulle@IDRIS.FR>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: mltex (was: encodings pair, babel 3.7 beta release)
Status: R

>>>>> On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 15:27:12 +0100, "Denis B. Roegel" <Denis.Roegel@LORIA.FR> said:
>   DR> To some extent the same goes with encodings, both input and output.
>   DR> Given the features of TeX, the choice of the output encoding
>   DR> is relevant for hyphenation,
>
>   hum, i guess you wanted to say: hyphenation is relevant of the font in use.
DR> No, I meant what I wrote.

well that wording is inappropriate. We should say: hyphenation depends
of the font in use.

I wrote:
>   no, any TeX using mltex option is independent of encodings. You can
>   use CM, EC, Times, ... what you want with any related encoding.
>   It would be so easy if all formats around the world were done
>   with the mltex option. It's free, standard (as an option can be) and
>   without any danger. But life is different ;=)
DR> I meant "the brand of TeX you are using is *usually* not
DR> independent of the (font) encoding you use."

it should. Only few TeX engines don't accept all font encodings,
which ones?

DR> Who uses mltex?
DR> Some people, but not everybody.

so you should come back to Word: everybody use it...
In other words i prefer to have plus than minus, but everybody
is free to use what he wants.

DR> Besides, I haven't followed the latest developments of MlTeX,
DR> but it used to be the case that fonts had to have a certain
DR> number of free slots for the "fictitious characters" MlTeX
DR> creates, in case these \charsubdef is used.

no, they are not "reserved" but "used" e.g. any new glyph defined
by \charsubdef is associated to a slot in the font, as any other
glyph...

DR> Is this no longer true? If it is still true, it means
DR> that some fonts cannot be used in MlTeX and at the same time
DR> remapping/virtualization to occur.

no, at one time one use 1 input encoding, 1 output encoding and 1 font.
Input encoding let TeX know which glyph is targeted.
Output encoding let TeX associate a slot in the font which is related
to the tageted glyph.
When using MlTeX option you only say to TeX to pick up 2 slots of the font to
produce the glyph inside the dvi (and let on the side the original font slot).
So, encodings should never differ and the only scholar-case for which
a pb could occur is when the 2 basic slots (in case of e-acute, the "e"
and the "acute" slots) are different in the fonts in use. In nearly 14 years
i use MlTeX i never fell on this pb, but you certainly did...

DR> I think some day soon, we will have format generation on demand, like we have
DR> font generation on demand, so that this will no longer be an issue.
DR> I actually wonder why this has not yet been done.

why not...

  --bg