Lars Huttar wrote:
Interesting. As a newbie to typesetting, reading the TeXbook, I certainly wondered which "axes" Knuth meant 'roman' to refer to... he simply describes it as 'normal "roman"' and gives a visual example. So far, all I'd gathered was that it meant "not italic."
you should keep in mind that plain tex is not meant as general puspose macro package but as base under Don Knuths own book related styles for instance, there is no general font system, just a bunch of definitions related to computer modern and math; also there is some math setup, some register management, some structure commands and a bit of tabular stuff at that time i think that the general idea was that one would write a style for each book (or series) and that a plain like package can be used as basis context is (like latex, lamstex, inrstex, amstex, ...) a more generic and configurable macro package both methods (dedicated vs generic) have their (dis)advantages
If it's designed not to do that in ConTeXt -- i.e. the ConTeXt designers decided to change the semantics of one of the basic control sequences in TeX, rather than merely providing a different one with new semantics --
not in tex, since tex itself has no macros defined, but in plain tex 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------