From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:20:06 +0200 From: tlaronde@polynum.com To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: <20110627172006.GA497@polynum.com> References: <20110625065017.GA638@polynum.com> <522e1e2a38aa18c291305563d362abfe@ladd.quanstro.net> <20110625150327.GA425@polynum.com> <20110625171134.GA3661@polynum.com> <20110626075745.GA395@polynum.com> <20110627114856.GA7099@polynum.com> <9308c52f360f6274e0730399741278ce@ladd.quanstro.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <9308c52f360f6274e0730399741278ce@ladd.quanstro.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i Subject: Re: [9fans] [RFC] fonts and unicode/utf [TeX] Topicbox-Message-UUID: f6ffa516-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 08:36:35AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote: > > and there's no penalty for having that many glyphs. it just > means that my font file as a couple hundred subfonts. these > are only open if needed. typically only 3 subfonts are open > at any one time. As can be clear from the even more desastrous level of my english than usual, I only had a minute or two to write the message. I DON'T SAY THAT I WILL RESTRICT TEX TO THE FIRST 256 CODEPOINTS. This is precisely why I have rejected your proposal. KerTeX will provide, because this is what is in the fonts, "latin1" font. But if there are other fonts for cyrillic, greek etc. I don't want to render TeX unusable. There are fonts on the one side; TeX on another. And TFM to link them. I only say that: 1) Forcing, as this was written in the XeTeX FAQ, user to enter the special codepoint for the fi ligature since, white eyes, scornful wave of the hand: "this is the way this is done with Unicode" is sheer stupidity. I don't want to be forced to specify a printing sugar instead of the composition of the alphabet. I want to be able to use ~ as a visible sign saying: don't break here, and not the "unbreakable" space plaguing messages nowdays. Etc. I hate languages supposed to be human oriented taking whites as semantically significant... 2) I say that one can add utf as input for TeX, and use whatever one wants/needs---if I speak about Linear B that's perhaps because I have some interest even in defunct scripting, no?---without dramatically changing everything in the core TeX engine. TeX, for maths, already switches fonts by using almost 16 bits. The same can be made for text, and there is no need to extend the conception of a font metric for TeX (except marginally for the flipping/mirroring of boxes for direction of writing), and one can have everything with TeX using 256 glyphes SUBFONTS, and more precisely, 256 entries TFM. (I add that all in all, if languages are not mixed, the present TeX can be used for whatever direction of writing: let the PS interpreter mirror the page, rotate, flip etc.; more involved when languages are mixed in the same page.) Subfonts are precisely what you are talking about. TeX does not use fonts. TeX uses TeX Font Metric. It needs only the metrics, and one can use whatever fonts, as long as it is described according to the expectations of TeX. One can imaging extending a little TeX to switch to TFM "subfonts" to let it mastered a layout that the _drivers_ will have to translate according to the native format of the fonts (the drivers handling really the direction of writing: depending on the hint, the box rendered is mirrored, flipped etc., TeX needing only to know what is the height and width [the correct corner] of the result). "Simplicity is the shortest path to the truth." I suspect that the current state is not the truth, considering the path taken and the size of the change files. (In an interview, D.E.K. spoke about omega, whose change file [against TeX source] was several times the size of the TeX source...) -- Thierry Laronde http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C