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

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> 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.

no need to yell.  i must be confused.  i thought you said that you
were using latin1 for .tex files.  i don't see a forward-compatable way
to get from latin1 input to utf-8 input.

> 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...

i don't even have an opinion on this.  i don't understand the conflation
of the input character set and tex's internal representations.  could
you explain why you are taking about them as the same?

to be brutally honest, tex could internally use an array of monkeys
flinging poo to represent characters /internally/ and i would be much
happer than with a reasonable internal representation and a difficult
and incompatable external representation.  at least that way the monkeys
flinging poo are hermetically sealed within the program and not flinging
poo all over my system.  :-)

> 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.)

again, i don't think anyone cares if this is how things work internally.

- erik