[lucida] upgrading + installation

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 14 févr. 2013 à 00:31, ivo welch <ivo.welch at gmail.com> a écrit :

> people like me barely know what a font-encoding is...not kidding.  so, I don't know why I would ever want to use LY1 instead of T1.  I thought when I specify lucidabr, there is one thing that I want: to use lucida.  that's it.  I did not want to think about what font encodings do or can do.  without a defined font encoding, a user probably did not include lucidbr.sty in order to typeset with CMR.
> 
> in my case, the case was worse, because my files from many years ago did not have the fontenc usepackage; somehow lucidbry.sty had it in it.

Ditching the original TeX encoding known as OT1 (ie the encoding documented in Appendix E of the TeXbook) was done at some point within the last decade AFAIR, at the same time the PSNFSS package switched from version 1 to version 2. The problem was that this original encoding was 7-bit and limited to little more than the 128 ASCII characters. It was fine for English, but not so fine for other languages in particular European languages with accents.

So the switch was made to 8-bit encodings allowing 256 characters hence leaving room for pre-accented letters. There are two such encodings mainly, T1 and LY1. T1 was devised by the TeX community, and the associated metrics were created with the fontinst tool; T1 relies heavily on virtual fonts. LY1 was devised by the Y&Y private company, and the associated metrics were created with the dvips afm2tfm tool; LY1 avoids the use of virtual fonts entirely.

Both provide mostly the same functionalities. I tend to prefer LY1 as it seems to produce spacing more pleasant to the eye and less hyphenations, but that's really a matter of taste. As Axel remarked, old-style numbers are easier to access with LY1 encoding. More precisely, LY1 follows the typographic tradition of associating old-style numbers with small-caps letters, while T1 doesn't.

Attached are two test files from last year, exemplifying this. See the numbers in the theorem or figure numbers, in particular. For background on the matter, see the thread starting at <http://tug.org/pipermail/lucida/2012-May/000418.html>.

As for lucidbry.sty, it's still provided for compatibility purposes. In essence, it launches lucidabr.sty with \usepackage[LY1]{fontenc} added. So by using it, you should be back to the behaviour you're accustomed to.

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin

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