Axis in nfss

[Thierry Bouche <Thierry.Bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr>]

Hi,

Quite a long time ago, it was said that "the good way to implement
MakeUppercase & friends would be to add a "case" axis to NFSS".

I'd like to know if some activity has been undertaken to address this.

It seems obvious to me that current nfss misses 2 axis, namely _width_
("series" should be broken into weight and width, this bx as
\bfdefault reflects TeX + CM history but has the notoriously bad
consequence of seeing bold extended used inside text, not restricted
to titling material) and _case_.

The current situation as regards "series" is not too bad because the
translation from markup to layout should be done in a class file, it
is however bad that such classes must be dependant on the font system
used. 

the "case" axis is really needed, and will be ever, since unicode
ignores small caps, and multiple digits shapes. (It's a unicode flaw,
imho, to enforce the capital/small letter distinction [two glyphs for
the same charachter, no?] and reject small caps,
lining/hanging/tabular figures).

I think that adding the cases axis would be rather harmless, since
people could simply ignore it (not the same for series vs
weight&width) _and_ very usefull, since many have been temptated to
turn some variant classes into families to have access to small caps
in italic or slanted e.g.). Moreover, creating the few missing fonts
with EC would be trivial, and maybe cleaner (accents for caps should
be in an all-cap font rather than in TS1?), fontinst could similarly
create a bunch more of VFs for supporting PS fonts as well.

I'm thinking at least at:

all caps (cap digits)
c&sc (sc digits--almost inexistant in practice: cf Bell expert)
all sc
c&lc (lc or old style digits)
all lc

Thierry Bouche, Grenoble.