[OS X TeX] possible character-mapping bug in gwTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 14 Oct 2005, at 11:09 pm, Christopher Brislawn wrote:

> I have encountered what appears to be a low-level bug involving  
> font rendering (possibly a character-mapping problem) in Gerben  
> Wierda's gwTeX distribution.  Although I am new to the Mac, I have  
> been using (La)TeX on Unix and Windows since the mid-80's and am an  
> experienced end-user, though no TeXpert.  I installed the gwTeX &  
> support i-packages and TeXShop 1.40 on my new G4 Powerbook (running  
> Panther 10.3.9), as specified at
>
> http://www.uoregon.edu/%7ekoch/texshop/installing.html
>
> The problem in documents processed with this setup is that three  
> keyboard characters render to PDF as incorrect glyphs in roman and  
> other font styles, although they render correctly in math and  
> typewriter styles.  The pipe character, |, renders as a dash, while  
> the inequalities, < and >, render as inverted exclamation and  
> inverted question marks, respectively.

Not a bug; this is expected behavior, and will be the same in any  
standard TeX installation on any platform.

Read the chapter on "TeX's Roman Fonts" in The TeXbook for details.  
When designing his typesetting system, Knuth chose to replace a few  
characters in the standard ASCII set with others that he felt would  
be more useful in typesetting (as opposed to computing); he did not  
use the standard ISO encoding for the fonts he created. (And when  
used with (La)TeX, other fonts such as Times are normally re-encoded  
to match Computer Modern conventions.)

<, >, and | do not normally occur in printed English text. Of course,  
if you're printing math or computer code, you want a different setup;  
and indeed, in math mode, things are different.

JK

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