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From: irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Looking for nicely looking "umlauts"
Message-ID: <605@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 88 12:32:18 GMT
Reply-To: irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 31


The glyphs representing the three extra Swedish characters "o with
dots", "a with dots", and "a with circle" look extremely ugly in TeX.

Somehow I have the feeling that non-Swedes think of these characters
as special instance of the letters "o" and "a". That is just as wrong
as describing the letter "E" as a special instance of "F" (who in
his right mind would describe an "E" as "an F with an underbar" ??).
The three letters I refer to are totally separate entities and Swedish
keyboards have special keys for them.  Historically, of course, the
special characters I'm discussing developed from "oe","ae", and "ao",
but that was many centuries ago and today there is nobody who remebers
this and the characters are treated on equal footing as the rest (a-z).
In fact, in "normal" Swedish we always replace "w" by "v" - how
would you Anglo-Saxons like if we replaced all your "w"s by "v"s?

Looking at TeX printouts you see that the dots and the rings are
placed *very* high above the "o"s and the "a"s whereas in Swedish typography
they are placed so low that they almost touch the "o"s and "a"s. 
This gives you the impression of that the people who contructed the TeX
glyphs representing the characters in question (erroneously) thought that
these dots/rings are some sort of diactricals. This is not so and my question
is:

Is there anbody out there who has created Swedish natinal characters with
the correct typographical look?  If so, please reply here or by e-mail.

-Bo

-- 
>>> Bo Thide', Swedish Institute of Space Physics, S-755 90 Uppsala, Sweden <<<  Phone (+46) 18-300020.  Telex: 76036 (IRFUPP S).  UUCP: ..enea!kuling!irfu!bt