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From: phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: No accented characters
Message-ID: <1048100005@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 1 Oct 90 03:34:00 GMT
Lines: 39
Nf-ID: #R:<9009291501.AA02718@lilac.berkel:-39:ux1.cso.uiuc.edu:1048100005:000:1837
Nf-From: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!phil    Sep 30 22:34:00 1990


I read and hear these things:

1.  Scalable fonts are bad, particularly for small fonts, because the
    proportions do need to change somewhat with actual size for proper
    readability.

2.  Umlauts (and quite likely others) are more than just mere letters
    with "things" stuck on them.

Solving these problems is not easy either.  Treating umlauts like accented
letters is not the best way to go, but it does solve the immediate problem
which is a total lack of such characters in the American character sets.

However, because this approach has solved some other problems as well, I
do not want to see it go away until ALL of the problems it solves are
solved by other means.  Umlauts for Americans is just one of them.

One of the reasons I like TeX is that it allows me to typeset text in the
Esperanto language as well as many others.  The approach of treating these
letters as accented letters made it possible (albeit not perfect) to have
these letters without someone having to create the fonts for them AND TO
MAKE SURE IT IS DONE FOR ALL LANGUAGES.

Of course it is not yet even close to perfect.  Cyrillic is missing.  And
languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hindu, Georgian, etc., cannot yet be
typeset.  A lot of work is due.

When the work is done, however, just be sure not to removed the facility
that exists now until you can prove that the work is absolutely complete.
This is not likely for quite some time.

Now if you have some scalable PostScript fonts for ALL the possible letter
shapes in all the languages whose alphabets is based on the Roman alphabet,
then I am interested.  If it omits one or two languages, the value of it
is diminished very greatly.

--Phil Howard, KA9WGN-- | Individual CHOICE is fundamental to a free society
<phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> | no matter what the particular issue is all about.