Re: Dense encoding, part II

[Adam Lindsay <atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk>]

Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On 2/5/06, Adam Lindsay wrote:
>> Hans Hagen wrote:
>>> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> The fact that all Polish fonts (lm, iwona, kurier, antt) now ship with
>>>> el-* files makes me wonder: is there time to do the next step and
>>>> finish the second encoding with symbols?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> indeed
>> Oop. Sorry, I hadn't been watching that.
>> I've suggested texnansi as a starting point, at least within ConTeXt.
>> What symbols do people want that *aren't* within texnansi?
> 
> 1. Would Caron & similar uppercase accents make sense? I doubt that
> many accents are needed in addition to what is already present in the
> other encoding anyway, but something like that could be used if there
> is no Ccaron present in the font for example:
> 
> \definecharacter Ccaron {\buildtextaccent\textCaron C}
> instead of
> \definecharacter Ccaron {\buildtextaccent\textcaron C}
> 
> In well-designed fonts (including all Polish fonts such as lm,
> antykwa, iwona, ...) the lowercase and the uppercase variant of the
> accent differ. (Try to write \Scaron\Ccaron in texnansi encoding for
> example to see the difference).

Good point... except that there are *no* accents available in eurolett, 
anyway. It *should* have all of the accented uppercase characters you 
need (within roman ;). The whole theory is to do away with building text 
accents. But what does Hans want? Should lc and uc accents be available 
to create `weird' combinations?

> Of course some care has to be taken, so that it will also work for
> fonts without those additional accents for uppercase characters (using
> \iffontchar perhaps?).

Indeed. I do want to avoid a strong dependency on the specific glyphs 
that appear in the font. That moves the encoding mess to *within* 
ConTeXt, which is not pretty, either.

> 2. perhaps some currency symbols missing in texnansi
> I would suggest to add Euro, but with some special care of course.
> Perhaps some users still prefer to use the regular (geometrical)
> symbol rather than the one taken from I-forgot-which-font (the default
> behaviour when \texteuro is used).
> 
> Any other currency on this list worth supporting?
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20A0.pdf
> Perhaps dong, lira, Won ...

sounds like ts1-like stuff.

> 3. Perhaps a short glimpse into:
> http://source.contextgarden.net/ts1-lm.enc
> http://www.cstug.cz/aktivity/2005/lm-at11e.pdf
> http://www.janusz.nowacki.strefa.pl/pliki/AntykwaTorunska-doc-en-2_03.pdf
> if you notice anything worth supporting.
> 
> "married" might be useful for geneaology, I guess that the leaf is
> there for the same purpose. No idea why anyone would want to use the
> musical note (ugly in lm and probably hardly present in any other
> font).

They're there because of ts1, which is *mostly* unhelpful here. I would 
have thought glyph coverage from places like Adobe, Storm, and Emigre 
(for example) might be a better guide.

> 4. numero sign, ordfeminine, ordmasculine, copyleft ;), I don't know

well, some of those are in standard practice, at least. ;)

> if anybody needs fractions, permyriad, ... one/two/...superior
> (present in some regimes) are pretty pointless in TeX where you can
> use \high{} I guess. Perhaps there should be two different glyphs for
> "tilde" and "asciitilde" (not sure about the last one.)

Yeah, I'm trying to be driven by *requirements* instead of "technical 
capability" (i.e., what already exists in a family of fairly peculiar 
fonts). I know those are around, but I don't hear a lot of calls for 
them since ConTeXt moved to EC as a default encoding.

adam
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  Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept.     atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk
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