What should go into \textfont1

[Alan Jeffrey <alanje@cogs.sussex.ac.uk>]

>People are willing to have to do ugly things to get the right output in
>uncommon cases, but they are totally frustrated when a program cannot
>produce the right output with any output.

Hmm... I think we have different views of the sorts of users we're
aiming at.  Karl's comments are apt for TeX users, but I was thinking
of LaTeX users, who don't know anything about typesetting, and just
want to get their paper out with as little fuss as possible.  I for
one don't envy trying to explain to A. N. User why $f(x)$ spaces
correctly, but $f\bold{(x)}$ does not.

>I suspect that sufficiently clever macros can make almost any input form
>work.

Surely the point of this discussion is that this isn't the case.  No
matter how clever your macro-writing, there's no way you can persuade
TeX to kern glyphs from different fonts, or to look adjust the
ligtable of a font (so, for example, ij generates a ligature for Dutch
but not for American), or to change its spacing rules for math lists,
or blah blah blah...  Some things in TeX are best addressed at the
font level, and passing the buck on to clever macro writers just
generates more work for everyone in the long run.

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.