Re: Script to automatically generate typescripts

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 18:08, Michael Murphy wrote:
> On 04/06/2010 12:00, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> Just note: you can get an enormous amount of font information with luatex.
>
> If you can get so much information out of LuaTeX, why do we need typescripts
> in the first place?

1.) The typescripts have been written long before LuaTeX existed.
2.) The typescripts still work is almost exactly the same way as they did before
3.) Your can read a lot of information about a specific font (which
features are available, which glyphs exist etc. etc. etc.), but that
still doesn't give you any information about which fonts you want to
combine together and which features you want to use.

Take Antykwa Półtawskiego. It comes as regular/italic, in 4 weights
(light, normal, medium, bold), in 5 widths (extended, semi-extended,
normal, semi-condensed, condensed), about 5 encodings for MKII. You
need to tell to ConTeXt somehow whether you want to combine light and
medium or normal weight and bold, or maybe normal with semi-extended
bold, you may want the size to adapt automatically when you change
font size. There is also no reliable way to determine which fonts
belong together. You still need to assign a font with a variant
somehow.

Reading info about a font doesn't really solve the problem of "being
able to automatically assign rm, bf, bi etc.", but I admit that there
*IS* room for improvement for font handling mechanism in a more
user-friendly way (and lua can be of enormous help of course).

Mojca
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