On 10-2-2011 11:03, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
Where is this interface? Does some documentation exists about how it
works and how it can be used?
Some of it has been reported in articles (and mk.pdf) and I will
document it in more detail when I've cleaned it up and feel satisfied
about it. Also, it's context speficic (I guess) and it is not on my
agenda to make every context feature portable (the concepts between
context and plain/latex/.. simply differ too much).
Well it is certainly easier if there are less encodings. But the
small encodings had one advantage: if you used a e.g. T1-encoded
font you not only knew which characters are encoded and their
position but also that the characters are actually present. You
that's not 100% true ... in the past I've ran into situations where
fonts missed glyphs; also, having a bad replacement glyph is also no
option (funny ogoneks are an example)
could safely switch from one font to another. With unicode fonts
this is no longer the case. If you switch fonts there is always the
danger that a char or an accent suddenly disappears.
One always need to check each font and the problem with e.g. otf is not
so much the coverage but more the fact that things like features are
somewhat unpredictable (defaults, correct implemenation, etc) and
successive versions can differ. So, patching them then also boils down
to keeping track of all kind of changes in releases. Nu fun.
Anyway, in context mkiv there are several extension mechanisms (aka font
goodies) and some of them also depend on support in the core (context)
machinery. I expect more of them and virtual trickery fits into that
picture. What ends up there is also user driven.
The lm and gyre fonts are fine. But they cover only a small part of
the glyphs used in the world. Many of the discussions I see are
started by people trying to use non-western/non-latin scripts.
Sure. Anyhow, I'm not going to spend time following discussions on the
pdftex and xetex list as I don't use these engines and context support
for them is frozen. If context users have demands in this area I'm quite
willing to fulfill them in mkiv using appropriate mechanisms and
interfaces. Support for advanced arabic (using additional features and
dedicated optimizers) is an example.
Fixing a font needs either the rights to do it oneself or the will
of the author(s) to do it. Both is often not the case. And fixing a
font may remove a dependency to a virtual font but it will add a
dependency to the fixed font version - which can get quite difficult
if more than one "fixed" version exists.
True, but as I mentioned, there are many fonts out there and one can try
to avoid the crappy ones.
(btw, context mkiv has some features for adding missing glyphs, which
might be why users don't complain too much here)
Hans
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