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: Proposed Computer Modern 256-char sets (Re: ISO Latin 1)
Message-ID: <DAMIAN.CUGLEY.90Oct1142230@msc3.prg.ox.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Oct 90 13:22:30 GMT
References: <FJ.90Sep25153811@indigo.iesd.auc.dk> <8691@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
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In-reply-to: spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk's message of 30 Sep 90 13:10:57 GMT

From:		Sebastian Rahtz <spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Message-Id:	<SPQR.90Sep30141057@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk>

> anyone who decides to tinker with the 32--128 area has got to
> be pretty confident. 

But surely we are not talking about a new ASCII extension, we're talking
about a new encoding scheme for typesetting fonts; there is no reason
for the two to be similar.  It's only due to a foolish omission from
TeX's internals that we *have* to have, say, the uc letters in 65..90
rather than being able to place them arbitrarily and using `textcodes'
(in the style of mathcodes) to map input chars to output chars.

Firstly the characters corresponding to <space>, ", |, \, _,
{, }, ^, ~, <, > will almost certainly *not* be used directly; these
keys will either be active or special in some other way.  So there's no
need to have them in those particular places in the font.

Secondly, apart from {, }, those characters *do not* appear in plain
text and so there is no reason to have them in every text font anyway.
If people want to use them as math symbols, they belong in a math font;
if people want to use them in discusssing the ASCII set they should
obtain them from a special ASCII font.

Even the proposed Latin8 convention recognizes this (apparently without
realizing it) - the neutral apostrophe/singlequote/acute character has
been replaced by an apostrophe and the backquote/grave character as been
replaced by an inverted comma.  This conflicts directly with their
assertion that the 95 ASCII "printing characters" are all done as the
appropriate ASCII characters.


> i am not prepared to say that `straight quotes' are not the norm
> somewhere in Europe.

Anyone know one way or another?