Re: texfont and font mechanism

[John Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Sunday 17 August 2003 09:18, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> Digging deep... ;-)
>
> While playing with some freeware fonts by apostrophic labs,
> shy fonts et al., I recognized some limitations of ConTeXt's
> (or TeX's?) font mechanism. I know this was discussed earlier,
> but I can't remember/find and answer.

The primitive \font statement would in fact enable one to use a hundred 
different variants if needed. But then they would have to be called 
individually in each instance of use. Context as a family of synonyms
which allows for a finite number of different combinations. These could be
used as the  font names where applicable, which preserves the usual Context
mechanisms for switching fonts for the usual cases. For the unusual case
one would use the regular TeX font mechanism:

font\foo foobar at 10pt

\foo
Text...

...and so on. 

I have felt for some time that the Context font mechanism required too much 
work for too little result.  So I use it where feasable but don't feel guilty 
about dipping back into the \font mechanism where necessary, such as for a 
title page font. 

But I am only a (perpetual) novice...

John Culleton