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Re: comments on mathfont-0.5


On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Ulrik Vieth wrote:

>
> When I had a look at Matthias Clasens' lastest release of his partial
> implementation of a new math font encoding, I noticed the following
> problems:
>
> 1.  It would be nice if the CHANGES file would use the same date format
> used elsehwere in the LaTeX world, i.e. 97/05/14 instead of 97-14-05.
> It's just a little confusing that way.

I have already changed the format of the CHANGES file (yesterday, just
after putting 0.5 on the net). Perhaps I should find out how to convince
emacs and cvs to create a nicely formatted ChangeLog...
Is a date format like `May 14, 97' acceptable ? Btw isn't 97-05-14 the
official (ISO) format for that date ?

> 2.  Some of the font tables in mathfont/doc/charts.dvi lie partially
> off the page.  The guilty part seems to be the line \textheight00pt
> at the top of mathfont/tex/charts.tex.  Replacing the 1000pt by a more
> reasonable value like 650pt should fix it.

Well, I might have messed up that file. When I first wrote it, I noticed
that the font tables for the extensible fonts went *way* of the page,
so I hacked nfssfont.tex to split the table in two halfes. Maybe that
confuses other parts of nfssfont.tex

> 3.  Some of the MF sources in mathfont/ym[a-f] use files with the same
> name but different contents.  When all these files are copied to
> mathfont/mf and found there first, some of the resulting font tables
> will be really messed up.  ~

This is really a bug. I probably have always looked at the mf sources
in the various working directories. The easiest solution would probably
be to simply omit the copying and leave the mf sources in the various
subdirectories. On a second thought, the files in mathfont/mf are
really useless, they will never be used by the make process unless you
remove their originals from ym[a-f].

> 4.  I wonder what happened about my suggestions for rearranging the
> MX font table in a more systematic way.  While I understand that
> there is a reason to have all the basic sizes up front, arranging
> the extensible sizes in blocks of 8 characters makes the whole
> font table much clearer.   It's just a matter of devising a scheme
> and adding \nextslot commands to the .etx files to implement it.
> (If I find some time, I might have another try at it myself.)

The main reason for arranging the MX fonts like they are now is
to have all slots which are directly accessed by macros at the beginning.
This is also the reason for the strange separation of the pieces of
some extensible recipes. Frankly, I do not think that a nicely arranged
font table is such an important factor.

Since you have proposed a more traditional layout of MX, I'd like to
hear your opinion on the xm[bf]s fonts which offer only the traditional
range of larger sizes. I decided to keep the splitting in MX1/MX2.
This has the big advantage that the macros can be the same - just the
variable parts of the font encodings are different and these are not
directly accessed by macros.

> 5.  Concerning the Euler version:  I don't see why you treat Euler
> just as another math version.  Shouldn't it actually be another
> implementation containing Euler as normal and Euler bold as bold?

Yes, perhaps, but that will be a trivial change after the Euler bold
fonts are in place. What is the correct name for such a combo of related
math versions like (cm) normal +  (cm) bold or Euler normal + Euler bold
--- a math layout ?

> 6.  Finally, concerning the bold version: While adding this is a step
> forward, it's still not enough to satisfy the needs of the physicsts:
> We still need a full set of Latin + Greek (i.e. a subset of MC) in
> bold sans oblique and/or bold sans upright.  While this shouldn't
> be too difficult for Latin letters, it'll probably need a complete
> redesign of lowercase greek to make bold sans greek sufficiently
> distinct form bold italics greek.

I'll gladly accept any font donations :-)
One more remark/question concerning bold: How do you like the bold
versions of the MX fonts ? I have created the parameter files by
diffing cmsy and cmbsy and applying similar changes to the cmex
parameters. Is it a good idea at all to have bold extensibles ? On the
other hand, if we don't, the basic size delimiters from MC will be bold
while their larger cousins are not, same for accents.

Sadly, there is not enough metaness in the AMS symbol fonts to create
bold versions easily. I have extracted the few glyphs which produced
acceptable bold versions and added them to yma (kappa1, backepsilon,
hbar, hslash,...)

Matthias

--
Matthias Clasen
Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg
Institut für Mathematische Logik
79104 Freiburg, Germany.   Tel.: +49 (0) 761-203-5606