Success story

[Lars Hellström]

At 22.57 +0200 2001-04-10, Joachim Trinkwitz wrote:
>Lars Hellström <Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se> writes:
>
>> You could try slanting the smallcaps fonts to get oblique hanging (a.k.a.
>> oldstyle) figures, but whether that is aestetically acceptable is another
>> matter. Then you would do something like
>
>Thanks alot for your solution. Indeed it would be nicer to dispose of
>the original italic figures (according to some typography books I
>consulted this should be the standard, if there is a standard in font
>questions: hanging figures in the upright font, versal figures in the
>italic one).

That must be one of the more bizarre suggestions for a standard that I've
heard of; I wouldn't want such a set-up.

>In some situations there surely is a need for the upright versal
>figures too -- is it possible to put together a virtual font with
>these? And how to make use of such a beast?

It is quite possible, but how hard it is depends very much on what glyphs
are actually in the fonts and what names they are given. You may have to do
some work with e.g. \reglyphfont to get it right and it probably
complicates matters unnecessarily to work through \latinfamily.

As for the "how to make use of" matter: \latinfamily uses a scheme of
assigning different LaTeX font families to fonts which are supposed to have
hanging and lining respectively figures, in your case the family with
hanging figures would be 5gmj (or ugmj) and the one with lining figures
would be 5gm (or ugm). I'm not too fond of that system myself, but it is
widely used.

Lars Hellström