Re: Font naming rears its ugly head again

[mackay@cs.washington.edu (Pierre MacKay)]

    In your raw encoding you have left out all the accented letters.
    There are two important reasons why I think they should be encoded
    in the raw font:

This may well be a necessary alternative coding, but it has to
be an alternative coding.  The reason is that once you stick
Aacute into the raw (-p flag) encoding, it pre-empts the
creation of a VPL composite recipe.  

Adobe Garamond and Caslon may create the accented glyphs
as simple (non-composite) characters, but the vast majority
of fonts from the vast majority of vendors use composites.

Special cases require special files.

That said, I fully appreciate the point about variations in
accent shape.  The defects of the normal approach are:
  1.  Accents over Uppercase ought to have less slope
      than accents over lowercase. (I do this in my adaptation
      of CM for Turkish.)
  2.  Many accented character sets provide for squatty
      uppercase so that accented glyphs will not ride
      way above the type shoulder.  It is a common complaint
      (is it not?) of Swedish TeX users that Aring is impossibly
      oversized for the taste of Swedish readers.  I use
      a parameter in METAFONT to crush down uppercase so 
      that the accent comes near to or within the limits
      of the type shoulder.  These effects are relatively
      easy to achieve with METAFONT but can also be achieved
      in type1 fonts, at the price of a lot of VPL editing.

We must be grateful for the existence of carefully designed
fonts such as JMR alerts us to, but I suspect we must also
allow that the vast majority of available fonts will not
be created with such care.


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