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About atomic encoding
- To: math-font-discuss@cogs.susx.ac.uk
- Subject: About atomic encoding
- From: Joerg.Knappen@uni-mainz.de
- Date: Tue, 05 Apr 1994 23:19:15 +0100
I just want to point out, that atomicness could be as well achieved via
_real_ fonts. Such a scheme is halfway implemented in the fc fonts, where
the upper 128 characters are generated only on demand, i.e. if their code
is known to METAFONT. Another example are Tom Ridgeway's wnri fonts.
Thus one can have a scheme as follows: METAFONT sources containing a huge
base of atomic characters or precomposed accented letters. Different driver
files choose different encodings out of this glyph base. One only has to
store the different tfm files and use a dvi driver which generates the
needed pk files on the fly. No tools like dvicopy (has someone ported it to
VMS ?) or virtual fonts are necessary.
The main point is, however, that no compromises in quality are needed.
It is possible to put the best a-ogonek available into the font base, one
can specify the positions of diacritics in terms of the underlying high
precision METAFONT coordinates and so on.
Also, the number of `atoms' can be easily increased, there is no need to
meet just another 256 restriction. Think of expert ligatures, medium caps,
oldstyle digits, swash letters.
--J"org Knappen.