On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 08:36:35AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
>
> and there's no penalty for having that many glyphs. it just
> means that my font file as a couple hundred subfonts. these
> are only open if needed. typically only 3 subfonts are open
> at any one time.
As can be clear from the even more desastrous level of my english
than usual, I only had a minute or two to write the message.
I DON'T SAY THAT I WILL RESTRICT TEX TO THE FIRST 256 CODEPOINTS.
This is precisely why I have rejected your proposal. KerTeX will
provide, because this is what is in the fonts, "latin1" font. But if
there are other fonts for cyrillic, greek etc. I don't want to render
TeX unusable. There are fonts on the one side; TeX on another. And TFM
to link them.
I only say that:
1) Forcing, as this was written in the XeTeX FAQ, user to enter the
special codepoint for the fi ligature since, white eyes, scornful wave
of the hand: "this is the way this is done with Unicode" is sheer
stupidity. I don't want to be forced to specify a printing sugar
instead of the composition of the alphabet. I want to be able to use ~
as a visible sign saying: don't break here, and not the "unbreakable"
space plaguing messages nowdays. Etc. I hate languages supposed to be
human oriented taking whites as semantically significant...
2) I say that one can add utf as input for TeX, and use whatever one
wants/needs---if I speak about Linear B that's perhaps because I have
some interest even in defunct scripting, no?---without dramatically
changing everything in the core TeX engine. TeX, for maths, already
switches fonts by using almost 16 bits. The same can be made for text,
and there is no need to extend the conception of a font metric for TeX
(except marginally for the flipping/mirroring of boxes for direction of
writing), and one can have everything with TeX using 256 glyphes
SUBFONTS, and more precisely, 256 entries TFM. (I add that all in all,
if languages are not mixed, the present TeX can be used for whatever
direction of writing: let the PS interpreter mirror the page, rotate,
flip etc.; more involved when languages are mixed in the same page.)
Subfonts are precisely what you are talking about.
TeX does not use fonts. TeX uses TeX Font Metric. It needs only the
metrics, and one can use whatever fonts, as long as it is described according
to the expectations of TeX.
One can imaging extending a little TeX to switch to TFM "subfonts"
to let it mastered a layout that the _drivers_ will have to translate
according to the native format of the fonts (the drivers handling
really the direction of writing: depending on the hint, the box rendered
is mirrored, flipped etc., TeX needing only to know what is the height
and width [the correct corner] of the result).
"Simplicity is the shortest path to the truth." I suspect that the
current state is not the truth, considering the path taken and the size
of the change files. (In an interview, D.E.K. spoke about omega, whose
change file [against TeX source] was several times the size of the TeX
source...)
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
