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Re: text chars in math fonts

>I like the idea of a second text ``complement'' font more than 
>sticking text characters into the math fonts.  I'm sorry I didn't
>make that clear in my previous message.

How many complementary characters are there that wouldn't be required
in math mode?  I've seen \dagger and \ddagger used this way (as binary
functors in category theory, if anyone's interested) and I'm sure that
all the other glyphs from cmmi and cmsy have been used in mathematics
at some point. 

In retrospect, I realized that small caps need to be in a separate
Cork-encoded font, since the large caps from c&sc may need to be
letterspaced differently from the caps from the text font, and c&sc
should have the full range of accents from the Cork encoding.  

(As a side issue, would it be possible to include c&sc in the NFSS in
such a way that italic or oblique c&sc were selectable?  For example, 

   \section{The Warsaw Pact and {\sc nato}}

might generate bold c&sc `NATO' in the A heading, and italic c&sc
`NATO' in the running head.)

Any complementary glyphs that are used in math mode (and for upwards
compatibliity, that means all of cmmi, cmsy, msam and msbm) should be
in a math font.  If there aren't many other glyphs, we might as well
put them all in a math font and be done with it.  Messy, but probably
unavoidable because of memory limitations and upwards compatiblity.

>I wonder if there is some way to modify TeX so that it doesn't
>store all of the TFM file when it opens the font, instead loading
>the characters on demand. 

The problem with this is that it would require a disk access every
time the user requested a previously unseen character, which would
probably be unacceptably slow.  

One alternative would be for TeX to support dynamic font loading.
This can almost be coded in TeX (for example, in the NFSS) but math
fonts have to be loaded in advance, since there's no way to predict if
a font has been referenced by a \mathchardef.  At least I don't think
there is... dynamic font loading is something of a black art.

Alan.

Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 59         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden