Re: Undeclared glyphs

[oneill@cs.sfu.ca]

I was glad to get three replies to my posting about using the 8r encoding,
but two of the replies left me frustrated and somewhat confused...

Sebastian Rahtz and Alan Jeffrey seem to be telling me that, as far as
LaTeX2e folks are concerned, the `T1' encoding is "the one and only way
to go". 

Perhaps this is sane, if the spirit of TeX/LaTeX is that only `often
encountered text glyphs' are present in the main font (*), and all other
symbols are partitioned off into a separate font. However, if this *is*
the idea, I think that before the the final release of the psfonts
package, someone will need to design such a virtual font with these
characters in them -- after all, developing a raw font which includes
all the characters available in a standard PostScript font but providing
no way to access those characters would seem to be, well, a waste of
effort at least. (Certainly, if I hadn't thought I could access those
`hard to reach' glyphs with this release, I'd never have seen much reason
to install it.)
	
	(*) Of course, then we have to decide which ones are and which
	    ones aren't, or at least believe the decisions made in Cork
	    over those of the designers of ISO-Latin1.

But, I want to use those `hard to reach' glyphs *now*, and the whole
political debate that says `the future is T1' is lost on me. I'd be
quite happy if I never used T1 at all (after all, I'd imagine that the
number of people who have installed the dc fonts is fairly small,
especially since the cm ones work fine for most purposes, and you'd need
to keep the cm ones around for .dvi files other people give you). So
I'd be quite happy to work with 8r for PostScript fonts and OT1 for
Computer Modern -- for me it would be better than T1 + MiscSymbols for
PostScript and OT1 for Computer Modern, and I can't help feeling that
I wouldn't be the only person working that way.  [Chris Rowley says that
LaTeX2e actually can't support more than one encoding, but this seems
to contradict my personal experience, where I've used T1 and OT1 in the
same document, and T1 and 8r in the same document. Perhaps he can clarify
what he means here.]

It seems like, Karl Berry does seem to think that using 8r directly *is*
okay and should be supported [to some extent, anyway]. Certainly I'm
glad that I can directly use 8r rignt now to get the characters I want.

Finally, some points of confusuion. Alan didn't think there was a .enc
file for 8r, yet there is one in the distribution. Also, I'm not sure
why 8r.sty is called that, since all other encoding files in LaTeX2e
are written <encoding>enc.def -- certainly, if one renames it to 8renc.def,
one can then do `\usepackage[8r]{fontenc}' [although it helps to do a
\rmfamily beforehand to cope with the \selectfont in fontenc.sty,
otherwise it fails to realize that you've switched the default font
family over to a PostScript font]. And to conclude, I was a little lost
by Sebastian's "you are on your own with using 8r as an encoding", since
it seems to directly contradict the README file in the distribution,
which says that this is supported.

Pondering,

    Melissa.

P.S. I'm now on the mailing list, so you need not CC me in replies.