Re: psnfss and lw35nfss

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

 > I think, having a dotless j is vital. It has been in the standadr TeX glyph 
 > set for 15 years, and I need it from time to time to typeset some text in 
 > esperanto.

On the other hand I'm rather worried about PostScript-specific info
getting into the VFs, since they're meant to work with arbitrary print
engines: TrueType, QuickDraw, ActiveZzzz, etc etc.  PSnfss is a bad
name which we're stuck with...
 
 > I also think (though not with the same strong affection) that glyphs which 
 > cannot be faked with resonable effort (like the letter eng, or the 
 > perthousandzero) should be completely absent from the tfm file and not 
 > point to black boxen. The rationale behind this is, that the error should 
 > occur at TeX run time and not as late as proofreading time.

Problem is that the default TeX behaviour is to put a warning in the
log file but not on the screen, so if you use a missing glyph then you
get no visible warning---the only way to find it is to check the
proofs by eye.  At least the black boxes produce a warning at the
dvi-processing level and produce a very visible `something's gone
wrong' indicator.

Alan.