questions & comments

Thierry Bouche Thierry.Bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr
Tue, 7 Jul 1998 14:08:18 +0200 (MET DST)


» A new suggestion: In my own use of postscript fonts, with expert
» sets, under TeX/LaTeX, I've found it worthwhile making use of
» the "superior"  (small, raised) characters provided in the
» expert sets.  This is particularly worthwhile if you're using
» oldstyle numerals (fontinst "j")  in the base virtual font,
» because those numerals were not designed to appear in
» superscripts, and look quite wrong when used that way (e.g. as
» footnote markers).  

I fully disagree with this point of vue. 

» Well-typeset older books employ a separate
» font of small lining numerals for footnote markers -- well,
» we've got that in the expert sets.  

You should say _some_ well-typest books... others don't. there has
been a time where the only availale digits were hanging ones. It was
not such a bad times, indeed. I believe that your criticism has much
to do with spacing and correct _positionning_ of available OsFs when
not on the baseline. That is a challenge i've not yet achieved to fix
that. You're not willing to use only small caps for superior
letters,aren't you?

» "mbbrsup" (yes, the name is anarchic, but unless I'm missing
» something there is no provision for this in the Berry naming
» scheme). 

i believe that melissa had a proposition for that (something like 0/1
for inf/sup variant?).

Well, why not? You could also have a 8x.sty because all these are
readily available from the 8x fonts, but it's always tedious in tex to
use digits that are not at their ascii location...  My opinion on that
is that what would be really interesting is to use these inf/sup as a
basis for optically scaled sub/superscripts in maths, but so many
letters are missing...

My point about all this is that i never use \latinfamily for a
personnal install of expert fonts because they are not so many
(especially, the ones i've bought) and every one requires special
treatments (alternates, ornaments, swash...).
Th. Bouche      <http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~bouche/>
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