Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!bu.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!ox-prg!culhua!Damian.Cugley From: Damian.Cugley@prg.ox.ac.uk (Damian Cugley) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Proposed Computer Modern 256-char sets (Re: ISO Latin 1) Message-ID: Date: 29 Sep 90 10:06:44 GMT References: <8691@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> Sender: news@prg.ox.ac.uk Organization: Oxford University Computing Laboratory, UK Lines: 34 In-reply-to: dhosek@frigga.claremont.edu's message of 27 Sep 90 17:18:28 GMT From: Hosek, Donald A. Message-Id: <8691@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> > There is a draft 256-character character set that came out of the > TeX90 conference at Cork. It is inadequate since it doesn't leave > anywhere near enough empty glyphs for quality typesetting (the > f-ligs of cm are not the full set of possible roman ligatures and > variants, especially for italic typefaces or oldstyle typefaces). Whew, I'm glad someone agrees with me ... I got sent a draft of it & was apalled at how much PostScript has corrupted people's minds (they'll be calling cmcsc10 "cmexpert10" next...) In particular, I thought the inclusion of straight quote marks, visibubble space and other ASCII paraphenalia in *every* text font is foolish and wasteful of character slots - 256 characters is tight enough as it is! Also, trying to include "every" accented character fails 'cos they'll always be leaving *something* out. (What TeX needs is better accenting primitives.) I was tinkering with an idea for a more-than-128-character font encoding which included smallcaps & every symbol that depends on the font - including Old English ones etc. - by having no accented letters. It'd include two of each accent (one styled for UC letters), but would need alterations to TeX-the-program to do hyphenation and accent positioning right :-(. Also, only some characters - letters, punct etc - would have set positions, the rest would vary from font to font, allowing unusual ligatures in unusual fonts. In particular, a "typewriter" or "ASCII" font would include straight quotes, ASCII-style circumflex etc. Does this make sense or am I just weird? /--------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Damian Cugley, Programming Research Group, 11 Keble Rd, Oxford, UK | | Damian.Cugley@prg.oxford.ac.uk =or= ...@oxford.prg in UK | | "It's a good job there are weekdays between weekends to relax in." | \--------------------------------------------------------------------/