Re: \=i

[Idris Samawi Hamid <ishamid@colostate.edu>]

On Fri, 21 May 2004 12:28:41 +0200, Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:

> did you try the latin modern fonts? they have many composed characters 
> as well as more/better accents

I just checked lmr12.pfb in Fontlab; the accent on hex charachter 1BA 
(imacron) is just as wide as in the plain.tex definition (and is thus 
useless)! If Hans or anyone else has any influence with the author they 
should convince him to change that asap... (Also, it does not seem to have 
an old-style option for numerals; indispensable for work in the humanities 
(i.e., my work;->))

Anyway, lm certainly looks promising; it will probably take some work to 
adapt it so that it can replace all the tweaking I've done to get cmr to 
work for me. Are typescripts available for lm?

I looked in the archives; I did have one very long letter (Tue, 23 Sep 
2003) with suggestions for lm if anyone is interested in reading them 
again...

I just sent a letter to comp.text.tex about that \=i business; since it's 
a little more clear & precise than what I wrote here I repeat it:

=============================================
This is a job/challenge for a real TeXnician;-)

For Computer modern, I need to redefine \=i so that it does the following: 
the bar over the <\i> must be the width of the i-box. In plain.tex the bar 
over the <i> or <\i> is much too wide, looks ugly and sometimes butts into 
other letters/diacritics when used frequently (as in frequent Arabic 
transliteration). In good quality typesetting the bar in the \=i is always 
smaller than for, say, \=a and \=u. (ConTeXt is nice in that it already 
incorporates the \i in its def. of \=i and I don't want to lose that 
feature;->)

Note that the solution must work for both slanted and non-slanted styles. 
I've played around with the plain.tex definitions for manipulating 
accents, but this one is way out of my league, I think. The main problem 
of course lies in defining a \rule with the same relative height as the 
usual bar in cm (\char'26), but whose relative width is always that of the 
i-box as defined in the tfm file. Once such a chameleon bar is defined it 
should be relatively easy to define it as an accent such that we can 
redefine \=i to give us dotless-i with a thinner bar. Also note that \= 
should maintain its usual definition for other letters.

Is anyone up to this challenge? I really hope so...

(I don't know how complicated this is but maybe a solution is worth 
publishing in Tugboat? Or maybe it's trivial which is fine by me...)

Best 2 all
Idris
=============================================
-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523