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Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]>
Wed, 16 Apr 1997 21:58:03 +0200
text/plain (49 lines)
Hans Aberg writes:
 > At 14:14 97-04-16, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
 >
 > >what does LaTeX3 have to do with scaled or not scaled fonts?
 > >LaTeX users should have access to any font they find suitable. how its
 > >implemented is irrelevant, if it has metrics. Its like saying LaTeX
 > >should mandate the sort of printer and paper that we use!
 >
 >   The experts will have to answer this more carefully, but I get the
 > impression that the LaTeX3 project deals with several issues concerning the
 > maths fonts issue, but one is certainly (eventually) including a new good
 > set of standard fonts, that can be used in technical typesetting. This may

wrong, the project people will certainly not work on designing glyphs.
if during or after the work on the character-encoding some
knowledgeable people get interested and provided additional fonts
fitting into the scheme then fine.

what the LaTeX project and many other people that worked on that
proposal tried to do is providing the means to typeset typographically
high quality math if the fonts are available and to make it easier to
provide interfaces to include available (and not yet available) fonts
in a transparent manner.

just like NFSS was designed to abstract from certain aspects of the
underlying technology by providing high-level interfaces that allow
you to include various types of fonts in your document without redoing
accessor macros, eg allowing both optically designed fonts and linear
scaled fonts.

 > end up in some non-base package, like the AMS-TeX package. Another issue is
 > making the development of additional such new font families easier. So I
 > get the impression that the idea is not that everyone should be able to
 > just flip in whatever they like.

right now the situation is that all math fonts available use their own
interfaces and encodings and any additional fonts being designed add
to the confusion by getting yet by having their own encoding so that
it is virtually impossible to work with any of them with ease except
in very restricted circumstances.

clearly typesetting can't be done without fonts, so a distribution
like LaTeX has to come with some defaults that do allow typesetting
(and this default might have fonts with new glyph-shapes if available)
but this is not the premier goal for us and can't be as we personally
don't have the proper resources for this.

frank

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