On 28 Jun 2008, at 19:55, Charles P. Schaum wrote:
This first bit differentiates a "backend" that refers to your font and a
"frontend" that you normally work with. Why?
Macros, macros, macros. Let's put it this way: You could have a myriad
of styles. That's what many in the WYSIWYG world do. Then ... they have
to keep track of them all.
But TeX, as a Turing-complete programming language that could
theoretically be used for lots of things, has the design of local
redefinition, so that "sans" within a group or a macro can be redefined
to something other than delicious without you needing to worry about
keeping track of global style changes.
In short, like the Unix "small is beautiful" philosophy (and good
programming) you make parts of your document that work, you put the
working parts together, and the whole thing should have a good shot at
working. It will also be remarkably consistent and behave in a manner
that is more regular than, for example, Word's typesetting engine.
And if you are working on a source for different outputs or even
different possibilities of publication, you can switch out a font
without having to muck about through every font reference in your
document, saving hours of labor.
\starttypescript [sans] [delicious]
\setups[font:fallback:sans]
\definefontsynonym [Sans] [Delicious-Regular]
\definefontsynonym [SansItalic] [Delicious-Italic]
\definefontsynonym [SansBold] [Delicious-Bold]
\definefontsynonym [SansBoldItalic] [Delicious-BoldItalic]
\definefontsynonym [SansCaps] [Delicious-Caps]
\stoptypescript
As I understand, this next bit maps the "expectations" of the
typesetting engine to the capabilities of the font. For example, when
working with InDesign/InCopy and importing things from Word, there's a
difference between character style mappings and local overrides.
Word processors usually employ local overrides. That means usually the
typesetting engine picks from the alternative of a font face for bold,
italic, and so on, or it takes the default face and changes its
rasterization to create a faux bold, italic, and so on. In good
typesetting, however, you actually link character styles with actual
fonts, just like you would when hand-compositing blocks of type in a
typecase with lots of clamps and so on.
This bit looks like what character styles do in InDesign. The more I get
into InDesign and work with my designers, the more I understand the
basic typographical principles that make TeX and ConTeXt elegant.
\starttypescript [sans] [delicious]
\definefontsynonym [Delicious-Regular] [name:Delicious-Roman]
[features=default]
\definefontsynonym [Delicious-Italic] [name:Delicious-Italic]
[features=default]
\definefontsynonym [Delicious-Bold] [name:Delicious-Bold]
[features=default]
\definefontsynonym [Delicious-BoldItalic]
[name:Delicious-BoldItalic] [features=default]
\definefontsynonym [Delicious-Caps] [name:Delicious-SmallCaps]
[features=default]
\stoptypescript
The following is not in the Ubuntu-distributed manual, so I am not sure
about it.
\starttypescript [delicious]
\definetypeface [delicious] [ss] [sans] [delicious] [default]
\stoptypescript
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