Re: Letter style once again

[Jeffrey Howard Kingston]

Actually this message is really about "virtual fonts", the idea that
a character when rendered in some font could be associated with an
arbitrary object (in Lout terminology), rather than a fixed letter.

This is a well-known idea, not hard to find in other systems.  I
have two comments.

First, it is a good general principle to start with some problem to
be solved, and only when it has been clearly expressed to move on
to potential solutions.  I guess I came in on this discussion late;
what problem are we trying to solve?

Second, a good font specifies not only the shape of each glyph but
also kerning between glyphs.  Since changing the shape of a glyph
is a kind of re-mapping of the character codes into something else,
it also raises mapping issues, such as what happens when they ask
for this character to be rendered in small capitals, what
hyphenation means in words containing this remapped character, etc.
It is easy to say in advance that these things can be ignored,
but the results will soon have people coming back to try to fix
them.

Jeff