[Fontinst] Re: [tex-fonts] Re: [texhax] On the proper look of the \AA

[Alexander I. Lebedev]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 Vladimir Volovich <vvv at vsu.ru> wrote:

Hi!

> <...>
> I'm not arguing against this statement: the design of all glyphs,
> including the Aring glyph, is dependent only on the style of the whole
> font and its aspects.
>
> We are discussing the case when there is NO Aring glyph in the LaTeX
> font encoding, such as OT1 or T2A font encoding.
>
> In this case, we HAVE TO construct the Aring glyph "artificially", and
> we have two ways of doing that: either just apply the ring to A using
> an \accent command, or put the ring closer to A using the approach
> currently used in ot1enc.def.

You have ignored one detail: for these fonts the designer can construct
the ring and other accents and PLACE THEM AT THE PROPER HEIGHT in order
to have their appearance in all composed glyphs as best as possible.
BTW, it's a common principle for font designers.

> <...>
> > BTW, I tried to build the \AA glyph for four fonts from
> > AntiquaPSCyr family using the strict standard LaTeX algorithms
> > (with the special definition for \AA glyph), and found an ugly
> > appearance in some cases because I can see an upper part of the A
> > letter inside the ring.
>
>May it be the result of incorrect metric for A and/or ring glyphs?

No, the metric of all glyphs was corrected.

> > So, the special definition is good for CM fonts and maybe for some
> > other fonts,
>
>Do you have a complete list of "other fonts"? Wouldn't it look ugly if
>we were dependant on font families in the generic encoding definition
>files?

I didn't check all the fonts from the PSCyr collection yet.  I'll do it in
a few days.

> > but is definitely not good for an arbitrary font.  That's why I
> > would propose to restrict the application of the special definition
> > of \AA only to CM and CM-related fonts.
>
>I see no way to do that properly.

The ugly position of the ring in composed Aring was surprising to me too.
I think this can be the result of different A letter and the ring sizes in
different fonts (bolder fonts need larger accents).  BTW, the A letter
in AntiquaPSCyr is about 5% higher then the CapHeight and it cannot be lower
because of the font style.  In bold variant of the font the ring in composed
Aring looks better because the A letter in this font is lower.  I guess
the special algorithm under discussion uses the CapHeight instead of the
proper letter height.

> Best,
> v.

Best regards,
- Alexander