[pdftex] Open type fonts / Omega / ...

[Hans Hagen]

At 03:47 PM 2/5/2002 +0000, Michael Chapman wrote:
>On Tuesday 05 February 2002 14:42, Hans Hagen wrote:
> >
> > this is the pdftex (i.e. good old tex) list;
>
>Thought I might be showing my ignorance, but did not think my question was
>"off list". Apologies, if after the following explanation, it still is:

no problem at all,

pdftex is a both a backend on the tex engine (as there is a dvi engine) and 
an extension in the sense that it has features like character protruding 
and hz.

it started as an extension to tex, but later thanh made sure that it also 
ran on top of etex; so there is pdftex and pdfetex; as a bonus, some other 
extensions are supported (input reencoding stuff and so)

omega is a different animal, it has 16 bit everywhere over the palce, is 
multi directional, has input parsing, but no pdfbackend and has not yet 
reached a stable state

due toe some fundamental differences between tex and omega, the pdftex 
backend cannot easily be applied to omega (which is a pity)

>Good _old_  TeX was plain ASCII, unless I'm wrong, nut now we have methods
>for both input and output encoding.

don't confuse tex the program (interpreter) and tex the language (macro 
etc) and macro packages (plain tex being the oldest of all)

>I feed some bizarre encodings into pdfLatex. I suppose I could convert them
>to something more standard, but I tend to use files "as is" if the encoding
>is accepted.

that kind of encoding manipulations is all based on (1) macro/active char 
trickery and (2) backend remapping of glyphs

>I was getting the feeling that the days of receiving non-ASCII single byte
>encoded text files were numbered, and that before long everything
>(idealistically!) will be in a UCS flavour (with UTF-8) as a front runner,
>perhaps?

sure, but one can write a utf-8 input engine in tex the macro language

>I just cannot see myself  (?ourselves) feeding say French text in UTF-8
>through a converter to get 'old' ISO-8859-1 to feed into pdfLatex ... but I
>have been wrong before.

well, it could (and has been) programmed (i have some stuff here but that's 
of no use to you)

>Kester Clegg's comments (admittedly about ?output encodings) seemed to raise
>a mere musing to the level of a practical question, but one which I felt
>needed experience perhaps more than (just) knowledge to answer ...

in most cases, remapping the input is not a big problem, apart from memory 
constraints and nasty multipass things; however, some time in the future 
tex's may become >8 bit thereby freeing the macro engine from this nasty job

Hans
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