Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!ox-prg!culhua!Damian.Cugley From: Damian.Cugley@prg.ox.ac.uk (Damian Cugley) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: No accented characters Message-ID: Date: 1 Oct 90 13:02:29 GMT References: <9009291501.AA02718@lilac.berkeley.edu> Sender: news@prg.ox.ac.uk Organization: Oxford University Computing Laboratory, UK Lines: 47 In-reply-to: A4422DAE@AWIUNI11.BITNET's message of 29 Sep 90 15:08:21 GMT From: Konrad Neuwirth Message-Id: <9009291501.AA02718@lilac.berkeley.edu> > X-Unparsable-Date: Sat, 29 Sep 90 16:54:58 MEZ > Reading the last [article] about the fonts having no accents at all (a) I'm not against accents (b) I'm not against having accented characters as separate glyphs (c) I do think trying to fit every accented letter used by every language ever existing into a font is just unworkable I would suggest having separate fonts per language/language group with a smallish number of accented letters & the facilities to make good accents of other letters for short quotes in other languages. Remember, I use an accented language, too (there are English words with accents.) The proposed Latin8 encoding isn't *completely* terrible, it just has a few problems, which just happen to be mainly where it attempts to be more PostScript-like - e.g., ASCII circumflex, straight quotes etc. Thus my assertion that PostScript was rotting people's brains. I am more annoyed with the inclusion of straight quotes, ASCII circumflex, visible space etc. than with the accented letters. > I am also somewhat dissapointed that the necesary ligatures like > ch, ck and ft didn't make it into the font. Some other characters are > missing, too, [needed] to make some reasonable typesetting. But then, > I think we are talking about different characters! One of the things I am griping about is the apparant obsession with cramming 256 characters into a "standard" font encoding which leaves no room for features like more ligatures - e.g., German ch, ck, or more eccentric ones in display fonts. Which ligatures are wanted **probably** depends on what language is being used; different countries *do* have different traditions. > I am sorry to say the following that generalized, but the > [anglophones] always have a tendency to think that one (at best > theirs) solution is good for every problem. That's interesting because it was me that was ranting about the proposed "one solution" to the problems of different languages having different accented characters. (Maybe because it doesn't include the Esperanto accents!)