Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!jarthur!dhosek
From: dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (D.A. Hosek)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: TeX/LaTeX are not stagnant! (was Re: Help me defend LaTeX)
Keywords: TeX
Message-ID: <2621@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 25 Oct 89 12:21:52 GMT
References: <1762@naucse.UUCP> <71781@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <2601@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> <5105@cps3xx.UUCP> <2619@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> <1737@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>
Reply-To: dhosek@jarthur.UUCP (D.A. Hosek)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
Lines: 49

In article <1737@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl> piet@cs.ruu.nl (Piet van Oostrum) writes:
>It is good to see that DEK is enhancing TeX. Actually, I am missing a few
>important things. I suppose Barbara Beeton is reading this list, so maybe
>she could communicate these things to DEK.

Actually, BB doesn't get comp.text (netnews is not as prevelent as I'd like
it to be... plus since I'm not too familiar with Unix, I often don't respond
to some queries, just so I need not deal with trying to figure out how to
do _x_ in jove... the currently referenced article was quite a tribulation
for me to post). In any event, DEK is still reluctant to enhance TeX and 
anything which can be done through macros will probably never become part 
of TeX. I'll forward your message to him anyway though, just to see what
he thinks.

>With all the new fonts available now, you easily run out of math families,
>e.g if you use Latex, families are used for the special LaTeX fonts. Then I
>want to have space for the AMS symbols (Mssymb), a few home-made symbols,
>maybe Postscript fonts. 16 families appears to be too small. I would like
>to ask DEK to enlarge this number. It might be difficult to do this in an
>upwardly compatible manner. Maybe a special notation for families larger
>than 15 would be necessary?

Actually, the restriction is not one of 16 families total, but 16 families 
in any given math environment. I thinkk (I may be wrong) that Mittelbach and
Schoepf's font selection macros (see the last TUGboat) are an example of 
how this works. Incidentally, there font selection scheme will be 
incorporated into version 3.something of LaTeX (TeX is not the only 
evolving system).

>Secondly, the hyphenation exception specifications are not general enough.
>It would be nice if complete \discretionary's would be possible in
>\hyphenation. E.g to specify the hyphenation of the (in)famous Bettuch in
>german (we have similar situations in Dutch).

The Germans have developed a convention with " that does this sort of
thing rather nicely. They type Ba"kken which hyphenates as Ba"k-ken, but 
through the magic of ligatures, "+k = ck (a single character) and ck+k
= kk (another single character. Thus the unhyphenated output is Bakken, but
the hyphenated is Back-ken (I may have gotten this confused, but the principle
is still clear). I'm not sure that things like this would be easily 
incorporated into hyphenation patterns.

-dh

-- 
D.A. Hosek           | Internet: DHOSEK@HMCVAX.CLAREMONT.EDU
                     | Bitnet: DHOSEK@HMCVAX.BITNET
                     | Phone: 714-920-0655
(I used to be a Mudder, but I got better)