lquote vs lcaron etc.

[Lars Hellström]

At 18.56 +0200 2001-09-24, Walter Schmidt wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Is there any reason why fontinst uses the names rangedash
>and punctdash for the glyphs endash and emdash?

Yes. The main reason is in the following quote from fisource.tex (a newer
version than the one on CTAN, I'm afraid):

"That a font is monowidth is however
something that one should take note of when installing it for \TeX,
as it means many of the glyphs in it have such a strange appearance
that they are (pretty much) useless. The \texttt{endash} is for
example usually only half as long as the \texttt{hyphen} and the
letters in ligature glyphs are only half as wide as normal letters.
Many of the ETX and MTX files that come with \package{fontinst}
contain special commands to avoid making use of such degenerate glyphs."

Rather than overwriting the definitions of endash and emdash, Alan chose to
let the ETX use rangedash and punctdash, whose definitions in latin.mtx
depend on whether the font is monowidth.

>Are there more such traps?

Quite possibly. I've always wondered what the idea is with the glyph name
FFLspaced (and its companions).

Lars Hellström