[luatex] luatextra font system
Will Robertson
wspr81 at gmail.com
Sat Mar 14 17:25:04 CET 2009
On 2009-03-15 00:04:15 +1030, Ulrike Fischer
<luatex at nililand.de> said:
> But only for the latin
> modern fonts there are eu1*.fd-files. As far as I know Will used
> this special way for the latin modern fonts because there are the
> default fonts and should always work.
Yes, although these days it would be possible to load the fonts with
purely fontspec commands; back when I wrote the eu1*.fd files, fontspec
wasn't sophisticated enough to get the fine-grained control that is
possble in the .fd files.
* * *
If you want to load the LM fonts by default in LuaTeX and use a
different font-loading syntax than XeTeX, but all means go with an EU2
font encoding. I'd argue fairly strongly that the CM fonts should *not*
be used and the LM fonts made the default as soon as possible.
* * *
Back to the connection between fontenc and LuaTeX. Assuming that LuaTeX
will always use UTF8 for new documents, there needs to be some way of
mapping unicode input characters to their appropriate glyph slots in
the font being used. LaTeX uses inputenc and fontenc to do this, and
while its LICRs are still being used they're an effective way to solve
the problem.
It's possible there'd be some value in constructing virtual unicode
fonts on-the-fly from T1+TS1 (+whatever else exists) so unicode input
characters can be directly mapped to their output glyphs (i.e., without
going through the LICR abstraction layer), but the main appeal of XeTeX
and LuaTeX is that you can use *new* fonts.
So, especially due to the TeX Gyre project, I don't see much need for
extensive support for old font encodings. As above, much of the current
system should still work, and OpenType fonts just have so much more
going for them.
Will
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