Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Adam Lindsay]

Hi all,

On Hans's suggestion, I've been working on a "dense" character encoding
that does away with combining accents and extraneous symbol-like
characters in favor of fully accented characters.

<http://homepage.mac.com/atl/tex/dense.pdf>

This encoding is sort of based on the EC encoding, but adds (to the best
of my knowledge) support for Romanian, Maltese, Welsh, Lithuanian, and
Latvian.

The punctuation that I kept was "typographic" in nature, that would fall
within a normal text flow, especially those affected by ligatures and/or
kerns. The typographic symbols were left out, including monetary
symbols. I reckon these could be called as symbols from another encoding.

The general intent here is to have strong support for (latin script)
modern European languages, in the context of Unicode input. I
concentrate on letters, in order to give as good kerning as possible
with a 256 character subset. The letters are fully composed, to help
hyphenation within TeX. Note that the encoding can't handle general
transliteration or other "academic" uses.

So with those goals in mind, does anyone notice their favorite *letter*
missing? Is there essential punctuation missing?
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept.     atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk
 Lancaster University, InfoLab21        +44(0)1524/510.514
 Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK             Fax:+44(0)1524/510.492
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re: Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hi Adam,

> On Hans's suggestion, I've been working on a "dense" character encoding
> that does away with combining accents and extraneous symbol-like
> characters in favor of fully accented characters.

> <http://homepage.mac.com/atl/tex/dense.pdf>

do you have an enc file to play with?

> So with those goals in mind, does anyone notice their favorite *letter*
> missing? Is there essential punctuation missing?


Looks fine so far, but I have only checked the chars I use (mostly
german). Did you consider posting this to the tex-fonts list?
(Although I wouldn't put too much effort posting there, the answer
will be 'we don't need this').


Patrick
-- 
ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net

Re: Re: Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Adam Lindsay]

Patrick Gundlach said this at Fri, 19 Aug 2005 12:34:11 +0200:

>Hi Adam,
>> So with those goals in mind, does anyone notice their favorite *letter*
>> missing? Is there essential punctuation missing?
>
>
>Looks fine so far, but I have only checked the chars I use (mostly
>german). Did you consider posting this to the tex-fonts list?
>(Although I wouldn't put too much effort posting there, the answer
>will be 'we don't need this').

No, I haven't, mostly for that reason. The discussion will inevitably
center around "why" rather than what. Still, I probably should, once the
project is further along.
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept.     atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk
 Lancaster University, InfoLab21        +44(0)1524/510.514
 Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK             Fax:+44(0)1524/510.492
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re: Re: Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Hans Hagen]

Adam Lindsay wrote:

>Patrick Gundlach said this at Fri, 19 Aug 2005 12:34:11 +0200:
>
>  
>
>>Hi Adam,
>>    
>>
>>>So with those goals in mind, does anyone notice their favorite *letter*
>>>missing? Is there essential punctuation missing?
>>>      
>>>
>>Looks fine so far, but I have only checked the chars I use (mostly
>>german). Did you consider posting this to the tex-fonts list?
>>(Although I wouldn't put too much effort posting there, the answer
>>will be 'we don't need this').
>>    
>>
>
>No, I haven't, mostly for that reason. The discussion will inevitably
>center around "why" rather than what. Still, I probably should, once the
>project is further along.
>  
>
later ... we just add the stiff to the context distribution, make a 
bunch of tfm files (lm to start with,  iwona/kurier/antikwa  next) and 
we will see what happens  ...  we can (maybe have to) involve Boguslaw 
Jackowski since he's one of my personal font authorities -)

Hans

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                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                             | www.pragma-pod.nl
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Re: Re: Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Vit Zyka]

Patrick Gundlach wrote:
> Hi Adam,
> 
> 
>>On Hans's suggestion, I've been working on a "dense" character encoding
>>that does away with combining accents and extraneous symbol-like
>>characters in favor of fully accented characters.
> 
> 
>><http://homepage.mac.com/atl/tex/dense.pdf>
> 
> 
> do you have an enc file to play with?
> 
> 
>>So with those goals in mind, does anyone notice their favorite *letter*
>>missing? Is there essential punctuation missing?
> 

OK for Czech chars too.

Only tcaron char is not searchable (if in my AR7 search for any letter, 
say 'a' I got all accented a variant; if for 't' 'ť' is not find), but I 
do not know if the problem is in a) AR, b) CMAP, c) encoding (enco in 
the font presented in the PDF has mostly tcaron but tquoteright is 
presented too). But tt is not a big problem.

vit

Re: Re: Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Adam Lindsay]

Vit Zyka said this at Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:42:18 +0200:

>>>So with those goals in mind, does anyone notice their favorite *letter*
>>>missing? Is there essential punctuation missing?
>>
>
>OK for Czech chars too.

Thanks. Good to know.

>Only tcaron char is not searchable (if in my AR7 search for any letter,
>say 'a' I got all accented a variant; if for 't' 'È' is not find), but I
>do not know if the problem is in a) AR, b) CMAP, c) encoding (enco in
>the font presented in the PDF has mostly tcaron but tquoteright is
>presented too). But tt is not a big problem.

Hmm, interesting. I get the same results in Apple's PDF viewer. (The
capital letter Tcaron is searchable, though!) There's a fair bit that I
don't understand about CMAP, however. (Also note that this was generated
a few months ago, and that recent CMAP improvements (I think I saw some
corrections go by on the mailing list while on holiday) won't be
reflected here.)

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept.     atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk
 Lancaster University, InfoLab21        +44(0)1524/510.514
 Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK             Fax:+44(0)1524/510.492
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re: Re: Dense Encoding - Comments wanted

[Hans Hagen]

Patrick Gundlach wrote:

>
>Looks fine so far, but I have only checked the chars I use (mostly
>german). Did you consider posting this to the tex-fonts list?
>(Although I wouldn't put too much effort posting there, the answer
>will be 'we don't need this').
>  
>
indeed, let's sort out our own problems; it's no real problem to get it in the distributions, but i'm too tired of this 'we don't need it' or 'why not use ...' or 'you are stupid because ...' kind of discussions; 

actually, i'd like to discuss (on this list) some standardization with respect to encodings and then we can make a nice zip with everything needed for those

Hans 
 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                             | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------