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From: dhosek@linus.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: No accented characters
Message-ID: <8750@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 29 Sep 90 23:19:01 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@linus.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 39

In article <9009291501.AA02718@lilac.berkeley.edu>, A4422DAE@AWIUNI11.BITNET (Konrad Neuwirth) writes...
>About the subject of the new fonts.

>  Reading the last mail about the fonts having no accents at all,
>I should say that I am rather shocked. Coming from a language that
>relies on accented characters, it is hard for me to understand that
>you want to throw those right characters out. TeX educates us to
>go for quality, so why should we use second class umlauts? Umlauts
>are not, in fact, accented characters but characters on their own
>(if you care to look into those old lead things, they had their
>umlauts as distinct characters (which could even have a rather quite
>different shape than those characters unaccented). If you understand
>written german, look it up in `Das Buch des Setzers' by Genzmer).
[etc.]
>//konrad

Well I personally have no problem with providing pre-accented
characters. I've been saying for years that it's the only way to
get quality typesetting (although there are cases, e.g., Hebrew
and Arabic where floating accents are a necessity) for latin
typesetting. However, speaking from the perspective of a font
designer, somebody tell me what character code to use for the ct
ligature. How about long-s and all its associated ligatures. What
about the extra ligatures I need for my Italic typeface? It's not
that the TeX world has become PostScript-corrupted, they've
become TeX-corrupted. I'd like to see two standard latin
encodings that will be far more inclusive and leave (at least) 16
vacant glyphs for special typographic features. Otherwise, I'm
not going to bother with that coding scheme for my typefaces at
all.

-dh

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