# What should go into \textfont1

Jan Michael Rynning made some sensible comments about which characters
should be in \textfont1, in particular that Greek, Latin, and
punctuation should all be in it.  The only problem is that this
contradicts the suggestion aired here earlier that each font (roman,
italic, bold, etc.) should have its own math encoding.  Under Jan's
scheme, math italic' would contain at least: italic Latin, roman
upper Greek, italic lower Greek, roman numerals, and roman
punctuation.  In the alternate scheme, the math italic font would
contain italic Latin, italic Greek, italic numerals and italic
punctuation, and the math roman font would contain the same in roman.

This presents us with a problem: one scheme allows the LaTeX user to
say $$\rm\bf\sigma$$ and get a roman bold sigma, but the other
produces better spacing.  Should a font standard aim to support
logical markup, or beautiful typesetting?  The answer should be
both', which means that in practice the answer is probably
compromise'...

Alan.

Alan Jeffrey        Tel: +44 273 606755 x 3238        alanje@cogs.sussex.ac.uk
School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences, Sussex Univ., Brighton BN1 9QH, UK.

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