[Fontinst] ugly Polish diacritics

[Walter Schmidt]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 23:40:27 +0100, Lars Hellström wrote:

> [re zdot]
> Using the height of i as a comparison is somewhat
>risky though, as it will fail for smallcaps. Perhaps the height of
>odieresis is better?

All I can say, is, that a Polish expert told me that \.{z} must 
match the i.  And there is no odieresis in the Polish language.
In a smallcaps font, however, we can stay with the present code 
for the Zdotsmall glyph:  Ismall has no dot, so there is nothing 
to "match".  That's how I understand it.

See also 
<http://studweb.euv-frankfurt-o.de/twardoch/f/en/typo/ogonek/>
a comprehensive overview on the design of the Polish letters.

Btw, are you going to adopt my zdot for the fontinst distrib?


>[...]
>>With Eogonek and Aogonek, the ogonek often protrudes over
>>the right edge of the letter.  This can be avoided by
>>building the glyphs in a way so that the the right edge of
>>the ogonek is aligned with the right edge of the letter.
>
>This is BTW the default LaTeX definition of \k.

Why not adopt this for the fontinst distrib, too?  
It might be a bit better than the present code.

>>[...] it does not work
>>with monospaced fonts, where the bare ogonek acent has the
>>same width as all other characters.
>
>Special cases for monospaced fonts are common in fontinst.
>\ifisint{monowidth}\then ... \Else ... \Fi constructions are often
>necessary.

I know, of course.  I just wanted to point out that there is 
no automatic solution for the monospaced case.

Generally, even with the suggested fixes, one still cannot 
create usable Polish letters without manual interaction.
For instance, I have made the font metrics for the LucidaBright,
LuxiMono and URW Grotesk fonts on CTAN.  Having to check and 
correct all the aogonek's and eogonek's -- and in the typewriter 
fonts also the corresponding uppercase letters -- manually,
that's not an amusing idea!  I hope you don't expect me do do
that...  Any volunteers (perhaps from Poland)?


>[...]
>>For instance, my VFs for the DayRoman font
>>were created with fixes such as
>>
>>  \resetglyph{aogonek}
>>     \botaccent{a}{ogonek}{412}% originally {850}
>
>I thought the ogonek was supposed to hang from the stem/serif of a 
>rather than from the bowl?

Yes, but I cannot explain why a displacement of 412 was appropriate 
in this case.  Take a look at <http://home.vr-web.de/was/x/dayrom.pdf> 
and judge it yourself!


>[...]
>[re Adobe Palatino]
>Try checking for negative height of the ogonek, and if so moving it up 
>to the baseline:
>
>  \moveup{\max{\neg{\height{ogonek}}}{0}}

Well, thank you!  I'll try it out.  I hope I can fix the Polish 
letters the "extended"  Palatino font families (pplx, pplj)
on my homepage.  However, am not going to correct the other font 
families, as long as there is no fully automatic solution.  
Again, volunteers are welcome.

best wishes
 
Walter

-- 
=====================================================================
Walter Schmidt                          <mailto:w-a-schmidt at arcor.de>
                                    <http://home.vr-web.de/was/fonts>
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