[lucida] Two very minor remarks on Lucida Type 1

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 13 avr. 2012 à 23:55, Karl Berry a écrit :

>    - With the basic and complete distributions of Lucida Type 1 now gone,
>      and only the complete distribution remaining, wouldn't it make sense
>      to set [expert] as the default option instead of the current
>      [noexpert]? E.g., line 409 of lucidabr.dtx on CTAN reads
> 	\ExecuteOptions{noexpert,lucidascale,slantedgreek,mathitalic1,errorshow}
> 
> Hmm.  Thanks for pointing that out, I would never have known about it.
> It sounds theoretically correct, but, I'm not sure the change is worth
> the incompatibility with all previous releases of lucidabr.  E.g.,
> someone who has just the basic set grabs the new package and suddenly
> existing documents stop working ...

Sure. I hadn't thought of backward compatibility. That is certainly an issue.

Take MathTime for example. It was released first as a set of three fonts, called MathTime 1.0 and 1.1 then MathTime Basic, and later additional fonts were added (incl. bold math) called MathTime Plus. MathTime Basic is the only set that was ever released for the then-dominant Mac TeX software Textures, and the only set cloned into the public-domain Belleek. 

However, the mathtime.sty LaTeX package was configured by default for the Plus set, and switching back to the Basic set wasn't as simple as for Lucida by changing a package option: you needed to get the original mathtime.dtx and mathtime.ins files, uncomment the line

	%\def\mtplus{}

in mathtime.ins then typeset it to regenerate all the .fd files. 

So yes, on second thought ensuring backward compatibility is probably the most important.

That given, couldn't some indication be added on the README file or similar, especially for people purchasing the Type 1 fonts from TUG, that for access to the full functionality of the fonts (e.g. upright Greek and bold math), the lucidabr package must be loaded with the [expert] option.

This may be especially important since the main documentation for the package, lucidabr.pdf, does not describe explicitly the options except for comments in the documented source code. There used to be such a description in earlier versions of the package (see the attached README from 1998, called lucidabr.txt, specifically the section "Package Options in version 4.4"), but at some point in the history of the package the description has been removed from lucidabr.txt and not replaced by an equivalent explanation in lucidabr.pdf.

Without any indication on the need of the expert option, a new purchaser of the fonts from TUG who would try to typeset

	\documentclass[12pt]{article}
	\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
	\usepackage{textcomp}
	\usepackage[vargreek]{lucidabr}
	\usepackage{bm}
	\begin{document}
	\[
	  \pi \qquad \uppi \qquad
	  \bm{\pi} \qquad \bm{\uppi}
	\]
	\end{document}

would get:

	/usr/local/texlive/2011/../texmf-local/tex/latex/lucidabr/lucidabr.sty:418: LaT
	eX Error: Symbol font `mathupright' is not defined.

	See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
	Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
	 ...                                              
                                                  
	l.418 ...mbol{\upalpha}{\mathord}{mathupright}{11}

With the expert option added everything typesets fine.

All that said, with the availability of the OpenType fonts it's likely the Type 1 fonts will gradually get less used, and the need for lucidabr.sty fade. So it's not certain the above modifications are worth doing. I must say I am myself liking the very straightforward use of the OpenType fonts through fontspec and unicode-math more and more, and will probably stop using the Type 1 fonts fairly rapidly.

Bruno

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