Re: Letter style once again

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2000 at 06:53:00PM +0200, Tamas Papp wrote:

> >     def @ecaron ...
>
> In TeX, one is able to define such constructs, and attach them to a
> letter (eg ? -> [commands for aacute]). I'd like to know whether Lout
> could do such a thing, for example, could one define the character 'X'
> as a command that draws a flower, and have lout typeset TAXI as
> TA[flower]I. Just wondering.

You can do this in troff as well.

My meories about TeX is hazy, but TeX is really gross in this respect.
There are all those "mouth" and other stages, active characters and
stuff - all controllable in one way on another.  Macrology on crusade.

My understanding is that troff has this implemented in a much cleaner
way, as part of word->ink translation (sort of what FixAndPrintObject
do in lout).  Ted, can you give details on this, please?


I understand, that this feature is requested to emulate glyphs missing
from fonts in use.  But look at it in a wider context.

What is the scope of this binding?  What happens when you are in a
different language and the *byte* 0xE1 is actually CYRRILIC CAPITAL
LETTER A (koi8-r), not LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE (8859-1)?

The right answer seems to be that this feature is actually an
emulation of Type3 on top of Type1 font, sort of Type3-in-Lout.
That is this binding is defined for a font.  E.g.

    for Lout font Times Plain map char with code 0xXX to the
    invocation of this Lout symbol @XX.

of course, @XX could be generic/smart enough that you can specify this
same mapping for other fonts as well.  E.g. you can probably use it to
tack an accent in Helvetica as well, while OTOH, you would use
@XXslanted with Times Slope and Helvetica Slope.

Hmm, suppose, using a hypothetic syntax:

    glyphsubst { Times     Plain "\341" @aacute      }
    glyphsubst { Helvetica Plain "\341" @aacute      }
    glyphsubst { Times     Slope "\341" @aacuteSlope }
    glyphsubst { Helvetica Slope "\341" @aacuteSlope }

we then need to size @aacute, set appropriate font metrics, and keep a
bit as well that this is actually a user defined glyph (and the symbol
itself of course).

Hyphenation and and sizing of words can then use those metrics naively
and only when word is printed we would notice the substitution and
replace "foo\341bar" with "foo"address@hidden"bar".

I guess this should not be too hard to make this change.

Any takers?

SY, Uwe
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