Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!enea!kuling!irf
From: irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Looking for nicely looking "umlauts"
Message-ID: <621@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jan 88 04:07:27 GMT
References: <605@kuling.UUCP> <4563@trwrb.UUCP>
Reply-To: irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 36

In article <4563@trwrb.UUCP> simpson@trwrb.dsd.trw.com.UUCP (Scott Simpson) writes:
>I don't think most Americans think that the A with a circle on
>top is an accented character so I think your generalization is
>unjustified. 

You are probably right, but most American physicicst colleagues
I've met think that Angstrom is spelled this way...

>an American version of TeX when you should be using a Swedish
>version.  For example, would you use the regular old plain TeX
>to typeset arabic?  

We have a Swedish version of TeX.  But that's not the point.  Plain
TeX provides umalut-o (o with two dots on top).  This letter is
used in many languages where it simply does not look right.  I have heard
this comment not only from Swedes but also from people who speak Finnish
and German.  I don't know what a Turk would say.  I doubt that the "ugly"
umlaut-o is acceptable in any language where it's needed.  If so, there
is no justification for its existence in TeX at all.  Most likely, it
was included in order to let all plain TeX users have the possibility
to write Swedish, German, Finnish, Turkish(?), etc words typographically
correct (this is not so for Arabic, so your comparison doesn't make much
sense to me).  Hence, a correction of its design in TeX is called for.
In fact, as a result of my earlier posting I got such a correction e-mailed
from somebody in Switzerland who had the same opinion as me.  I have not had
time to test his version yet.  I also got in contact with some other Swedes
working on the same problem so there is a good chance there will be a
solution soon.

Anyway, thanks for your comments.

-Bo Thid\'e  (in TeX ...)


-- 
>>> 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