On 15 January 2010 Lars Hellström wrote: > Just to be clear here: By "composite" you mean that there are really > two glyphs being combined to make up one letter? > > I first felt a bit confused when reading this, but that's probably > because I've been thinking about Unicode lately, where (the semantic > counterpart of) this kind of thing would be called "decomposed".
Well, composed chars are supported by Unicode, though deprecated nowadays. Since Christopher is talking about Type1, I suppose that the seac subroutine (standard encoding accented character) is meant. As its name implies, it supports Standard Encoding only. For glyphs not supported by Standard Encoding you usually have provide a new glyph. More about seac here (page 56): http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC.PDF If only accented characters are needed, one could put both, the base char and the accent into different subroutines. This saves space, at least if different base chars are to be combined with different accents. Ogoneks are quite problematic because they are part of the glyph. If the ogonek is a separate outline, it's very likely that it overlaps with the outline of the base character, which isn't allowed by the Type1 spec. If outlines overlap, you get funny results. In Gentium, the Vietnamese glyphs with a horn accent show this problem in Adobe Reader at some resolutions: http://vntex.sourceforge.net/fonts/samples/t5gentium-sample.pdf It's easy to add accents to glyphs if there are no overlaps. Han The Thanh provided separate glyphs for all the *horn characters. The following example shows /o from Blue Sky Research Computer Modern (blue) and /ohorn from VNR (red): http://tug.org/~kotucha/ohorn.pdf There are no overlaps but a lot of work was necessary. At DANTE-2006 in Berlin, Boguslaw Jackowski held a talk where he explained why /aogenek should be a separate glyph rather than a composite: The ogonek is not an accent, it's part of the glyph. And whenever you create such a glyph, you have to keep in mind how such glyphs are drawn using a pen. Christopher, I'm pretty sure that TeX Gyre Pagella is a much better starting point than URWPalladioL. Especially because you can be sure that Jacko made sure that Eastern European languages are supported properly. And Pagella provides SC and OsF already. Pagella is currently not hinted optimally; Jacko is aware of it. I think that the sole benefit of using Adobe fonts is that the latter (currently!) contain better hints. It's definitely worthwhile to evaluate TeX Gyre Pagella before you invest a lot of time into your own developments. In LaTeX, just say \usepackage{tgpagella} Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
