J%ORG KNAPPEN writes: > Frank schrieb: > > > Yes i'm seriously thinking that splitting TS1 into say, TSA (adobe default) TSE > > (with expert set) and so on would be helpful to actually make sure that if you > > have a font that claims to be in some encoding it really has the glyphs of > > that encoding. > > I suggested making a TSA encoding for Adobe fonts years ago, but noone > undertook the work. :-) why do this statement makes me smile? the point is really that all this needs people and time, there is unfortunately a big gap between suggesting something and finding people to do it or to do it yourself. but i don't want to claim that my idea is original > > Similar T1 should then be expanded to have companion encodings which are > > used for fonts that do not have Ng etc. > > > The number of encodings wouldn't grow that much, but then you could > > really be sure that you get what you ask for and not just some square > > boxes in the output and some error messages from dvips. > > I'm afraid, the number of encodings will grow much. There are more > founderies than Adobe around (like Monotype, Linotype, Agfa, Berthold to > drop some names) and they all have different basic and expert glyph sets in > their fonts. My font book from FontShop lists about 70 founderies, the new > edition probably has even more of them. there is a difference however between a font encoding and an encoding provided for, say, NFSS. You do not need to model all encodings as 1-1 NFSS encodings, since you have to build vfs or at least tfms anyway you can ignore that some font has a few additional glyphs. So if one would come up with an alternative to T1, that could be implemented with many basic fonts that would already be a big help > In addition, glyph sets aren't constant in time; older fonts lack the > Euro sign newer fonts have. > > Fonts are a real mess (not only with (La)TeX, but also with the so-called > professional versions for PC and Mac) and I don't see that the state of affairs > will change on foreseeable future. yes sure, fonts are a mess (for any system) and you can't change that fact. however we can make our lives somewhat more comfortable by not building extra problems, and T1 was a mistake as it was designed with the world view of "TeX lives in a world of its own and all it has to do is to provide a wonderful font set which can typeset as many (latin based) languages as possible and then all is perfect". unfortunately less would be more now > IMHO, the black box replacements in vf's are an error: An unavailable glyph > should be unavailable in the tfm file as well and provoke a harsh TeX > error message. To catch the black thingies at proof reading stage is rather > late and error prone. agreed frank