On Thursday, April 3, 2003, at 09:48 AM, Adam Lindsay wrote:
And I suspect that's something to be avoided if possible, considering the price of changing fonts and typescripts. A lot of what I typeset is an alphabet soup of acronyms, so I'm much more drawn to an approach with small caps as a context-sensitive font alternative (perpendicular to \bf and \it).
Well, it's no problem to define \sc in each typescript, so that you get the normal weight small cap glyphs for acronyms without any need to change typescript. It's just when you start to combine different axes (weight, shape, optical size, etc.) that things get tricky and the ConTeXt font mechanism (which doesn't even support semi-bold) cannot cope.
I will take your comments on the complexities of OpenType to heart (you've been looking at the problem longer than I have), but I do want to spend some time thinking about a rational approach.
Absolutely. It's why I posted the original note back in August! I'll be interested in what you come up with. There was discussion on the TeX fonts mailing list awhile ago about coming up with a new font naming scheme (in turn tied to a new installer) that could relate to these questions. It'd be nice to see that progress to support these sorts of fonts, and to then in turn feed back into the ConTeXt mechanism. Bruce