Hi Phil & Reinhard, Reinhard sumarized it well enough: it's not trivial to do. Also, adding new features to pdftex is not desired now. If you want to alter the font matrix, maybe it's worthwhile to take a look at the examples in samplepdf.tex. It requires some macro programming, but I am sure it's trivial for you. Regards, Thanh On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 06:57:16AM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) writes:
Dear Thanh / PdfTeX team --
Has any consideration ever been given to the idea of extending the syntax of TeX's \font command within the context (small "c") of PdfTeX ?
What I have in mind are the following :
\font \cmex = cmex10 rotated <angle> \font \cmex = cmex10 translated <matrix>
Hi Phil, I like such a feature too. But there are some technical problems. Type 1 fonts have a font matrix which can be altered when a font is loaded. It's quite easy to change the matrix in order to slant, rotate, ... a font. But pdftex also supports TrueType fonts which are lacking a font matrix.
It doesn't mean that pdftex isn't able to do what you propose, but it's nontrivial. It has to alter the so-called PDF text matrix. But this sounds easier than it is.
I made a similar suggestion a few years ago. I modified the text matrix of a PDF file in order to slant an upright font and posted the resulting PDF file to the mailing list. I asked whether pdftex can't do something similar. I got a response from Mark Wicks, the author of dvipdfm. He said: "Your example is too simple." He had been right, things turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
And changing the matrix isn't sufficient. You'll certainly have to adapt the .tfm files. All this doesn't look like a weekend project.
Regards, Reinhard
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------