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Re: preliminary EuroTeX paper


In the draft for the EuroTeX paper, Ulrik discusses some alternatives
for the split MXP/MX1, especially he proposes to add the open brackets
to MXP. I have looked into this, so let me report my findings here:

We currently have the follwing slot requirements:

			MXPs			yhmath		MX1s 
 
open brackets							20 (7sizes+ext)
radicals		13 (8sizes+2small+ext)	17 (14sizes+ext)
slash/backslash		16 (8sizes)		28 (14sizes)
accents			24 (12sizes)		26 (13sizes) 
free slots		 6

So there is indeed the possibility of adding the open brackets to MXP,
if we cut down the number of sizes for slash/backslash to 8 (like in yhmath)
and reduce the number of accents to 11. There would also be space in MC
to add the basic size open brackets. They could be placed around the #,
or alternatively, the daggers could be moved there to make room for the
open brackets next to the other delimiters.

I think this might be a good idea, since the open brackets are present
in cm, Lucida and MathTime (?), so we could avoid having an almost empty
MX1-encoded font in all these encodings. 

What do you think ?

Another question for discussion: Is it really a good idea to have the 
double accents in MSP ? They will be missing in most implementations.
We might even consider dropping them altogether and rely on the amsmath
approach to double accents. The code for that is already in newmath.sty
and seems to work reliably (it is of course much slower than ready-made 
double accents). Even if we decide keep the double accents somewhere 
(eg in MS1), we might rethink the choice of combinations: I would expect
the double hat to be the most frequently used double accent, and it is
not currently among the combinations in MSP. Does the AMS have statistics 
about the relative importance of double accents ?

Regarding the discussion on kerning between open and ord: One reason I
could think of for TeX not to use kerning between open and ord would be
the following: This would only improve the apprearance of the basic
size delimiters, but not of the larger sizes.


Regards, Matthias


-- 
Matthias Clasen, 
Tel. 0761/203-5606
Email: clasen@mathematik.uni-freiburg.de
Institut fuer Mathematik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg