Font Religion (was: How can I check for the existence of a glyph inTeX?)

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

Berthold K.P. Horn writes:
> PS Type 3 fonts are not useful because ATM doesn't understand them.

TeX understands type 3 fonts (provided they have a TFM) and my drivers
(dvips and TeXview) understand type 3 fonts, so dismissing them as not
useful isn't just harsh, it's factually incorrect. In fact, with
appropriate configuration of bitmaps, even PCs and Macs can use them.

> If the NFNT bitmap does not match the actual font it is wrong.  And
> if it does what is the point of talking about the NFNT?

Under your definition most Macintosh NFNT resources are `wrong' -- in
fact the whole Macintosh way of doing things is wrong.

> My philosophy is that the scalable outline is the ground truth, and
> everything else better match that -- character shapes, glyph complement
> and metrics.

Your philosophy is not that of TeX though, nor is it the philosophy all
operating systems TeX runs on (e.g. MacOS).

    Melissa.