Incorporating symbols in roman fonts

Lars Hellström Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se
Sun, 10 Feb 2002 14:58:10 +0100


At 03.18 +0100 2002-02-10, Christian Kuhn wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I still am fighting with understanding the installation process by
>fontinst, and i still use as an example the FSGaramond from the
>FontSite-CD. When using the expert and SC-Fonts, i can reduce the
>missing chars in all encodings. 8r is complete, in T1 the only
>symbol missing is perthousandzero, in OT1, nine greek caps and
>lslashslash are missing, and TS1 lacks of 45 chars. Two questions:
>
>a) In general, is it preferrable to ignore the gaps, or is it
>better to fill them with chars from other fonts? (assuming a
>corresponding symbol font is available)

I'd say you can ignore them without feeling guilty about it, but of course
it is better if you can fill at least some of the gaps with proper symbols.
Taking the symbols from another font (even from another family) is not that
big a problem---LaTeX tends to do that all the time, e.g. when the current
encoding is OT1 then \textbraceleft is taken from the math fonts. If the
CapHeights of the fonts do not match then the greek capitals might look
odd, but that can to some extent be fixed using \yscalefont and friends.
The only thing you'd really have to look out for is however whether there
is some problem with font technologies; if your main font in PS type 1 but
you take some symbols from a MetaFont font (effectively bitmaps) then the
latter might look very bad in e.g. a PDF.

>b) In the case of the FSGaramond, is there a suitable symbol font
>among the PostScript standard fonts?

You'll have to make up your own mind about that, I'm afraid (unless someone
on this list has already done what you are doing and can tell us about it).
Try making use of what the standard fonts provide and see if the results
are OK.

Lars Hellström