On 2/10/06, Adam Lindsay wrote:
Mojca Miklavec wrote:
1. Would Caron & similar uppercase accents make sense? I doubt that many accents are needed in addition to what is already present in the other encoding anyway, but something like that could be used if there is no Ccaron present in the font for example:
\definecharacter Ccaron {\buildtextaccent\textCaron C} instead of \definecharacter Ccaron {\buildtextaccent\textcaron C}
In well-designed fonts (including all Polish fonts such as lm, antykwa, iwona, ...) the lowercase and the uppercase variant of the accent differ. (Try to write \Scaron\Ccaron in texnansi encoding for example to see the difference).
Good point... except that there are *no* accents available in eurolett, anyway. It *should* have all of the accented uppercase characters you need (within roman ;). The whole theory is to do away with building text accents. But what does Hans want? Should lc and uc accents be available to create `weird' combinations?
I know that there are no accents available in "el", but I thought this was in order to make more space for other glyphs that require kerning and hyphenation. I still think that people might need to build weird accents every now and then. At least I would need to - we sometimes need accents for stressing pronunciation (most of them are present in "el" just because other languages consider it to be a separate letter, but see the very strange definition at the end of enco-def.tex ;) and it would be a pity to take that strength of TeX away. I prefer having a couple of badly kerned words (most are OK anyway) than having to make my own glyphs and asking other people to compile those documents on their computers. I don't claim that there's a need to have both uc and lc variants, but at least the lc variant should be present. And another point: Antykwa Poltawskiego has it's own encoding defined for example. I guess they're going to complete the font soon in the same way as they did with Torunska, but currently ConTeXt uses modified font, so that the font fits into the ec and texnansi encoding with some empty slots in it. There is no "Ccaron" present in the font, but I could imagine that ConTeXt could use ANTP. with "el" encoding and once it would notice that there is no Ccaron present, it would build it from C and Caron. I'm not mentioning that because of ANTP since it will be improved anyway, but because of other incomplete fonts that might profit from the presence of such accents.
Of course some care has to be taken, so that it will also work for fonts without those additional accents for uppercase characters (using \iffontchar perhaps?).
Indeed. I do want to avoid a strong dependency on the specific glyphs that appear in the font. That moves the encoding mess to *within* ConTeXt, which is not pretty, either.
It depends if it's automatic or not. If ConTeXt could automatically recognize which glyphs are (not) present, it would be possible to "play safer".
I don't hear a lot of calls for them since ConTeXt moved to EC as a default encoding.
People who need them stil use texnansi ;) But sure, I just wanted to point out some glyphs that some might find useful, I don't claim for any of them that they should go in (except for accents and ordfeminine/masculine/numero), they might need discussing first. If we're talking about Adobe: many fonts include "mu" (micro) or "Ohm" for typesetting units. In lm and other TeX fonts this is not necessary since there is math for it. I'm hardly ever using Adobe fonts, so I can't really judge if this might be useful or not. Mojca