Re: [9fans] [RFC] fonts and unicode/utf [TeX]

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 02:43:32PM -0400, Michael Kerpan wrote:
> Modern TeX implementations like XeTeX and LuaTeX handle UTF-8 natively
> and also bring all sorts of benefits like OpenType support (automagic
> ligatures, real small caps, selectable lining or old-style figures and
> more) and the ability to define fonts from the system font pool rather
> than using archaic incantations and magic scrolls from the early 90s.

I don't know what "automagic" ligatures are; but ligatures are here in
the kerTeX fonts, user having nothing special to do to have them. Small
caps are here. Using the system fonts is here too, at least for T1
fonts: afm2tfm(1) makes them available. For other fonts format,
writing a whatever2tfm(1) will do the job.

And "archaic" is definitively a marketing sentence, not a scientific
judgement: "Euclid? Well... it was perhaps good for the epoch..."

> The problem is that these modern implementations are HUGE. On the
> average Linux system, TeX, LaTeX and other paraphernalia seem to take
> up well over 1 GB these days. I've given up on TeX because it's just
> so darn big.

So have I.

>
> There is, however, hope. Heirloom troff manages to include many of the
> same whizz-bang typographic features as XeTeX and friends (including
> Unicode support, smartfont support, easy loading of fonts in modern
> formats) while taking up about 1/100th the resource footprint. Clearly
> what we REALLY need is a filter that takes LaTeX sources and processes
> them into TROFF commands to feed to a port of Heirloom troff ;)

kerTeX is 1/100th of the current TeX distributions and is C89, that is
the most portable. It lacks some Heirloom troff features, but it is for
text and mathematics, includes a font designer: METAFONT, a figure
designer: MetaPost and a bunch of debugging utilities, coding utilities
(WEB), fonts and a state of the art documentation.

So I stick to kerTeX. And I have recorded what _you_ propose to do ;)
Since you seem to claim that the way _you are engaged in_ is easier than
the road I have taken, you should have finished before I have finished
kerTeX, rendering it /* sigh */ obsolete...

Not to mention that I can work on kerTeX only during limited slots of
time, since my main developing time is for a huge beast: KerGIS. And it
should be noted that I manage alone forks of G.R.A.S.S. and TeX and al.,
while "millions of users! thousands of programmers! hundreds of
developers!" seem to be unable to evolve correctly the "community
driven" equivalents... So imagine what one can achieve if one can
concentrate on a far more limited scale? But beware of the tortoise...

This is a lesson "GPL fanatics" have learned: say, by principle, that
"free software" is perfect, and closed source one a desaster. Why?
Simply because if someone criticizes open source code the answer is
immediate: "code is here, be my guest". While, with closed source, one
can spend gallons of electronic ink saying: "This sucks ! If only
I had the code...".
--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C