Hi, Hans Hagen wrote:
it's a matter of lack of tex families; once we have bold, something else has to be dropped
More precisely, here is the font family setup of ConTeXt \fam 0 math roman (with uppercase greek) 1 math italic 2 math symbols 3 math extension 4 italic 5 slanted 6 bold 7 -- 8 bold slanted 9 bold italic 10 smallcaps 11 typeface (sans serif or typewriter or ..., text font) 12 math symbols a (ams) 13 math symbols b (ams) 14 math symbols c (mathtime script) 15 math symbols d (mathtime greek upright) Only family 7 is really empty, and only 14 and 15 can easily be redefined (\newfamily always returns 15)
the best thing (nowadays) is to have two typefaces defined, one normal, and one bold
future versions of context may have more support (soon pdftex will have
16 families)
256 families of fonts with 65536 possible characters each, just like in Aleph.
btw, one of the problems is that several passed over the math list are made, which means that font switches are not treated as in text (think of \bf test \sl test)
(i dunno if that can be solved in future tex's)
Not sure that would make sense. Font switches in math mode are in fact different from ones in ordinary text. {\sl A} and {\bs A} may well have completely a different meaning. Cheers, Taco