Re: Undeclared glyphs

[Metod Kozelj <metodk@fiz.uni-lj.si>]

Hello,

I have followed the discussion about 8r encoding, it was rather interesting.
But the latest Melissa's posting iritated me. Here is why.

> 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.

As far as I undestand the purpose of DC fonts (and T1 encoding), they were
designed to help people, who are using character sets other than
plain ASCII. If you take a look at document 'dok.tex', which can be found
somewhere near Metafont sources of DC fonts, you can see, which nations
benefit by using T1 encoding and DC fonts.

It is quite sad that T1 encoding and ISO-Latin2 are so different, but
there are ways to go over that. I don't know, which encoding was
made earlier.

It is true, that most 'aditional' characters in DC fonts can be constructed
by using regular TeX commands, but the results of later are not very
satisfactory every time. Just an example: letter c vith check can be
constructed with TeX command '\v{c}', in T1 encoding one can get it with
'\char{"A3}' ... you can see the difference (the check on the character
constructed with '\v{c}' put too much to the left).

So, don't spit on T1 encoding if you don't really need the benefits it
has comparing to other encodings.

With kind regards,
--

Metod Kozelj

student at Physics dept. of University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
E-mail: metodk@samson.fiz.uni-lj.si
URL: http://www.fiz.uni-lj.si/~metodk/


PS. Please, excuse me for using stronger words, I am just quite upset.