[Fontinst] Re: \glyph_parameter change proposal

[Lars Hellström]

At 16.55 +0200 2003-09-03, Vladimir Volovich wrote:
>"LH" == Lars Hellström writes:
>
> LH> The principal matter generally boils down to this: are
> LH> `-not'-glyphs really glyphs? For \width, \height, \depth, and
> LH> \italic they are certainly just as good as raw glyphs,
>
>that's exactly the reason for my proposal: make these commands work
>when there's a "not-glyph". i was not complaining about the
>unreadability of error message which occurs when one attempts to use
>\height{...} when "..." is not encoded, but i am suggesting to make
>commands like \height work properly in more circumstances than they
>work now.
>
>it is possible that there is a need to refer to glyph metrics for
>unencoded glyphs - e.g. when re-encoding the font to OT2 encoding, one
>may still wish to be able to access the \height{x} to set fontdimen
>parameters;

One can already do this by saying \height{x-not}. But wouldn't the height
of "cyrillic small letter ha" (U+0445) be more appropriate in this context?

>or when building faked glyphs, it might me useful to refer
>to glyph metrics of some other glyphs which might me unencoded.

Again, it is already perfectly possible to do this. But you (as the author
of an MTX file) have to bother to explicitly access the metrics of this
unencoded glyph.

>will the proposed change to the \glyph_parameter command have some
>undesired effects? if not, why not change it? :)

As I explained, the proposed change does indeed have undesired effects, for
example because of the \edef that \glyph_parameter needs to survive.

Lars Hellström