Re: chancery font

[Thomas A.Schmitz <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On Apr 3, 2005, at 9:40 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> Ok, I certainly did _not_ intend to start a flame war, was just 
> dreaming out
> loud:-))
Idris,

no flame war intended! I know that we have very similar interests (btw: 
how's "critical editions in ConTeXt" doing?), that's why I stated what 
I feel about it. (For the manual: have you looked in your inbox 
lately?)

During the last weeks, I have written a perl script to create an 
automatic encoding vector for ttf (Unicode) fonts with Greek letters. I 
have spent way too much time on it. It works reasonably well, but I 
always have to look at things and correct stuff manually. Font 
designers are too [insert favorite swearword here] to give decent names 
to their glyphs, and since we need those names for the encoding, it's 
hard to make things happen automatically. Fonts claim to follow the 
Unicode standard, but then have glyphs in the wrong place. Some 
designers even modify the standard Adobe names, so you can't even use 
the normal ec or texnansi-encoding.

>
>
> I have even more difficult issues with Arabic;-)
Yeah, I can believe that.
>>
>
> Hmm, seems we've heard the same comment about Linux in the pre-KDE 
> days:-)

Tell you what: I think right now the same is true for linux. As long as 
you're satisfied with the standards some distribution gives you, you 
might get past the CLI. But try to integrate a piece of unusual 
hardware, or modify settings, and presto, you need  the terminal and a 
basic understanding of Unix.

> Seriously, there is room in the TeX world for a creative gui approach, 
> and
> ConTeXt would be a much better candidate than LaTeX for that to work. 
> Yes,
> this is just a dream for now...

Well, let's dream and not take this further. Bedtime over here in 
Europe...

All best

Thomas