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Hello Pierre,<br>
<br>
I'm not sure I understand fully all of what you've said; but I'd
hate to see your intervention unanswered, so I try to elaborate,
however clumsily.<br>
<br>
Le 15/04/2011 16:36, Pierre MacKay a écrit :<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA85800.7010406@comcast.net" type="cite">Adobe
continues to sell (or lease) reasonably well-designed fonts with
encoding vectors such as /Eacutesmall and /twooldstyle, but ones
hope of using them in a PDF environment is flakey at best, (you
must remember the disaster that made all files distilled in
Distiller 6 entirely unusuable in Reader 7), and I have recently
encountered a new problem even when using Adobe Professional 9 on
Windows. On Monday, Distiller was still able to use the weird
little patch that makes up for the fact that Unicode simply does
not recognize style variants. Now it fails. The on-line
distiller doesn't work at all today, and I am wary of that because
online distiller likes to take gray-scale EPS and turn it into
black blobs.</blockquote>
<br>
Why are you using Distiller at all? Why not producing PDF at once?<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA85800.7010406@comcast.net" type="cite">The
simplest answer would be to take the Adobe fonts that happen to be
encoded in Adobe's own abandoned Expert Character Encoding
Standard (So that's what they mean by standard---something you can
dump without a word of warning) and recode them as variant fonts
to fit in to several Unicode pages here and there. But that
requires uncompressing a PFA file to Ascii, and it appears that
they now have the fonts so locked down that that can no longer be
done.</blockquote>
<br>
I think you're ripe for LuaTeX. It can dissect a font and let you
reassemble it at will, and even turn it into a virtual font if
necessary. The character-glyph mapping is whatever you wish.<br>
(I swear I'm not paid by the LuaTeX team to mention the engine as
often as possible in my messages.)<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA85800.7010406@comcast.net" type="cite">
Linotype has never offered anything but crudely stripped down
auxiliary fonts, and usually not small-caps at all. Many other
foundries do not even bother with old-style figures, so that the
numerous clones of Times New Roman (I am forced to use this font)
are not usually a resource. So far as I can make out, Linotype's
answer to ff ligatures is to pair-kern the characters so that they
look like a careless set crash. <br>
<br>
Surely the industry can do better that force us to give up good
ligatures, old-style figures and small-caps. Or are we being
slowly groomed to surrender to an unending diet of Courier.</blockquote>
<br>
Why would the industry bother to refine their products when most
people using them don't give a damn about those refinements? Fashion
is more important: every luxury shop in Zapfino (at least in
France), industrial products in Rotis Semi (idem), novels in Sabon,
and Minion threatening to become the new multipurpose font after
Times New. Not to mention font mismatches: I thought I'd seen the
worst of it with Atlantic Books' edition of William Gaddis' <i>Agapē
Agape</i>, with the editor's notes in Univers and the main text in
Aldus; but David Foster Wallace's posthumous (and unfinished) novel
<i>The Pale King</i> has the first words of each chapter typeset in
oversized Gotham, with the text otherwise in Baskerville -- as if to
punish the reader (rush to it nonetheless, folks, it was released
yesterday!).<br>
<br>
I don't think one should expect anything from the industry if
typography itself is dying (there are also some successes, of
course, but I won't mention it; this is a rant, after all). What I
would like to know is how to make good typography, from font to
binding, more widespread.<br>
<br>
Also, I wonder what is to be expected from free fonts. Although for
the moment most of them are nothing but visual noise, resting on
industrial foundries alone is perhaps no good solution.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA85800.7010406@comcast.net" type="cite"> I
think this is a broader question than should be addressed only to
TeX fonts. It has to do with the entire quality of typesetting.
Was Don Knuth simply naive when he aimed to make it possible to
set ``beautiful books.'' <br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Ah, but Don Knuth didn't give CM oldstyle figures.<br>
And yes, for what it's worth, I think he was naive. Most of what is
done with TeX isn't beautiful, unfortunately, because it is mostly
done by people uninterested in typography. Not that I'm very happy
with that, mind you.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Paul<br>
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