FMi on text symbol encodings

[Rebecca and Rowland]

[snip]

>My very personal opinion is that some very exotic MF-only signs are not
>very helpful for Tex's future to restrict the setup to the CM-style in a
>world where Type1 font technology is practically accessible for
>everybody.

Hmmm....  Not so sure about that - some people use computers that can't use
any version of ATM or Ghostscript that's currently available[1].  In any
case, ATM costs money and Ghostscript is slow and not all that good at
rendering PS Type 1 founts (as well as being very awkward to use and very
unreliable on my computer).

What about all those people with old MS-DOS computers and no (expensive)
PostScript printer?

Yes, pdftex will be a solution one day, but only when it's been fully
developed.  Even then, not all computers have a pdf reader readily
available for them.

Rowland.

[1]  There's an awful lot of people still using 68000 4MB RAM Macs, for
example; I assume there's at least as many people still using equally
obsolete MS-DOS boxes.