Re: ConTeXt and expert fonts

[Jens-Uwe Morawski <morawski@gmx.net>]

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 12:48:12 -0400 (EDT)
"Bruce D'Arcus" <darcusb@muohio.edu> wrote:

> OK, I've gone through all the manuals, and tried hard to figure this 
> out, but obviously don't quite get the details of the font system in 
> ConTeXt.
> 
> I want to set up a font (like Minion, or in this case Hoefler Text) for 
> use in the following way:
> 
> For all tables    monospaced figures (osf or lining)
> For all headings and page numbers   proportional lining
> text  osf
> footnote markers  superiors

IMO, the main problem is that there is no standard encoding
for those glyphs. The most common font encodings texnansi and
ec do not include oldstyle figures and other interesting expert
glyphs.

Another problem is that some fonts are available as expert fonts
(Adobe Garamond) others are a package of normal fonts with a special
small caps and osf font (Adobe Palatino). But these are not in expert
encoding. This makes it difficult to set up these fonts for TeX.

The only way i know is to use fontinst. Then you can, for example,
build an normal font (HoeflerTextNormal) and a variant that
replaces the normal numbers with osf numbers (HoeflerTextOSF).

Look at http://home.vr-web.de/was/fonts.html, there Walter Schmidt
has set up many commercial fonts for LaTeX using fontinst.

fontinst has direct suport for real expert fonts, look in the
fontinst manual, there you can find an example how to install
Adobe Garamond expert fonts. But since the result will be
ec-encoded fonts some glyph are still missing.

This problem can only be solved with an new TeX-font-encoding.
Okay, one can of course develop a module that gives access to
those glyphs, but then each application has to develop this
support from scratch. That is IMO a bad solution.

> Why not in ConTeXt then?  If one has a complete expert set of a font 
> like Minion, shouldn't what I outlined above be the default behavior of 
> a TeX macro system?  Once TeX supports OpenType this will become all 
> the more relevant...

Currently TeX doesn't support OT since it has no 16Bit font encoding.
Okay, i know, Omega has, but this is not the common way.
I think we, the users , should first encourage the developers to
merge all the different TeX-developments (e-TeX,pdftex,NTS,Omega) and
establish this way a new standard for TeX, esp a new standard font encoding.

I hope Hans can say more, since he is involved in some of these projects.

Best,
  Jens