On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 19:08, Peter Park Nelson wrote:
If adding MnSymbol support were only a matter of tedious manual labor, I
That is more or less the case. There is no reason why it should not work with ConTeXt. The main reason why I never looked into it is that the font offers different optical sizes. And supporting optical sizes is something that complicates matters a lot. If you would be happy with a single optical size, that would be a lot easier.
would be willing to give it a try, but without an understanding of font internals I don't know where to start. Perhaps someone can suggest resources for learning?
Are we talking about MKIV? ConTeXt sources. math-vfu.lua and other math-*.mkiv/lua files, as well as font-*.mkiv/lua. You need to define a mapping vector to map from 8bit font to UTF-8. See for example mathencodings["tex-mi"] = { [0x1D6E4] = 0x00, -- Gamma [0x1D6E5] = 0x01, -- Delta in math-vfu.lua or tex/context/fonts/lucida-math.lfg or keep asking questions. There is no manual to explain how to write such vectors.
Also, I see that there are MnSymbol files in http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/fonts/extra/mnsymbol/ but these don't appear to be included in my ConTeXt Standalone installation. Does anyone know about them?
You need an extra switch. I think that --font=mnsymbol should work, but I need to test (there's a chance that it doesn't and I plan to change that anyway). Mojca