Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!frigga.claremont.edu From: dhosek@frigga.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: Proposed Computer Modern 256-char sets (Re: ISO Latin 1) Message-ID: <8770@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> Date: 1 Oct 90 17:46:50 GMT References: <8691@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU Reply-To: dhosek@frigga.claremont.edu Organization: Harvey Mudd College Lines: 63 In article , Damian.Cugley@prg.ox.ac.uk (Damian Cugley) writes... >From: Sebastian Rahtz >> 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 , ", |, \, _, >{, }, ^, ~, <, > 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. Umm, did you know that it's possible to use TeX fonts on a Macintosh like any other font? Blue Sky Research has a PD utility for the conversion from PK to goofy Mac suitcases (or whatever they are). Well, once upon a time when I was "play-testing" Textures, I decided, "I'm typing TeX material, I'll use cm as my text font." Well, I couldn't use cmr since ", |, \, _, {, }, ^, ~, < and > were not in there places, so I decided to use cmtt instead. Guess what I got everytime I hit the space bar! (I don't remember whether I also got random characters with carriage return or not). Not all of us are content to limit our usage of TeX fonts to TeX. There are some sizable markets out there for fonts; if the TeX font coding standard is usable by other applications, maybe TeX people will be able to get other people's fonts in the local coding scheme (exciting prospect, no?). Think about it. The Cork standard still sucks, though. >> i am not prepared to say that `straight quotes' are not the norm >> somewhere in Europe. >Anyone know one way or another? The only language I can think of that uses identical quotes for openings and closings in typeset material is Hebrew. But they have a whole other alphabet. But straight quotes are standard for other applications (e.g., Word for Morons, etc.). Leave 'em in if it'll make it possible for some typeface ecumenism. -dh --- Don Hosek TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont support, consulting dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu installation and production work. dhosek@ymir.bitnet Free Estimates. uunet!jarthur!ymir Phone: 714-625-0147 finger dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu for more info