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Re: preliminary EuroTeX paper for review


A few comments on the paper.  Apologies for the lateness.

Also, I have scanned the messages on this list over the last 2--3
months but I may have missed where these things have already been
discussed and decided: if so, further apologies.


chris

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You say that oldstyle digits are not used in math typesetting; this
may be true of strictly math typesetting but they were once standard,
and are still sometimes used, in data tables (and make them much easier
to read).


This paragraph seems to me to be misleading:

  Plain \TeX{} and \LaTeX{}~2.09 occupy a number of additional
  math families for extra math alphabets such as text italic,
  bold, typewriter, or sans~serif, which may be of interest in
  typesetting computer programs, but are relatively rare in
  mathematics.  In \LaTeXe{} these math families are no longer
  needed since the switching between math alphabets is implemented
  differently.

\LaTeXe{} does use math families to implement \mathbf \mathsf \mathtt
(ie things declared with \DeclareMathAlphabet) but they are allocated
dynamically, thus each uses up one math family only if it is
used in a document.

More generally, I have worked with systems that use bold and sans
serif alphabets, and even bold sans serif.  I certainly do not think
one can call the use of \mathbf rare, which is what seems to me to be
implied by this paragraph read as a whole.

Something unimportant but vaguely related to this.  In a different
context the paper mentions `sans glyphs' for the MC encoding: I have
never been able to imagine what a sans serif version of many of these
glyphs could possibly look like but I guess that is just my limited
imagination!


The names newmath.sty and oldmath.sty sound to me like amsmath.sty.
Perhaps newsymb.sty and oldsymb.sty, which sound like amssymb.sty,
would be less likely to confuse (me, at least:-)?


The rest are not directly comments that affect the content of the paper:

> For most of the code,
> preparing a Plain \TeX{} version simply means rewriting
> \cs{DeclareMathSymbol} statements as straight-forward
> \cs{mathchardef} or \cs{mathcode} assignments.

Or (easier?? and better?) set up a plain-compatible def of
\cs{DeclareMathSymbol} and input the same file.


> In addition to the slash (`$/$'), and those punctuation marks
> that were included in the {\OML} encoding for kerning reasons,
> the {\MC} encoding will also contain the basic-size delimiters
> (parentheses, square brackets, curly braces, angle brackets).

As I understand them, the rules in App G imply that, with the normal
set-up, there will never be any kerns between an opening or closing
delimiter and the glyph that follows it, whatever the font says about
kerning the relevant slots.


> it loses the ability to
> have kerning between the upright and italic Greek letters.

Not a great loss?

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