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Re: Comments on 0.56


>> 4. The documentation:

> One line in my todo list actually reads: `Update bigdoc'. 
> Currently we have more or less

> - newmath.dtx/.fdd:  Dokumentation of the LaTeX interface

Bad choice, since both would produce a newmath.dvi. 
Please consider renaming newmath.fdd to something else.

> - layout-<whatever>: Font charts for each layout
> - bigdoc:            Dokumentation on the Encodings and
>                      Design goals, decisions and more 
>                      font-related things.

> While newmath.dtx/.fdd is OK (I guess), layout-<whatever> is just
> a half-an-hour hack to get font tables for each layout in this release.
> bigdoc has been neglected for some time and  will need an update.  

One option might be to take out all the font tables from bigdoc,
perhaps even put the new documentation of the new encodings 
in a separate file as well, so that bigdoc will just present 
the framework and to separate sub-documents for everything else.

> From a usability standpoint, wouldn't it sometimes be better to have
> a symbol from cm (even if it isn't a perfect match) than no symbol
> at all ?  And would using dummy.tfm solve the table-generation
> problem ?  I guess you would just get empty tables, no ?

Presumably, such a substitution of a symbol from CM/AMS should be
requested explicitly rather than occur automatically.  (And yes, 
it does occur in practice.  Several IOP physics journals are printed 
with MathTime fonts, but they apparently resort to AMS glyphs for
leqslant/geqslant and lesssim/gtrsim.  In the MathTime MSP font,
I've faked these symbols to avoid such problems in the future.)

As for the table-generation problem, I suppose layout.tex should 
gain some intelligence, so that it can deduce from them math layout,
whether or not "extrasym", "extraops", or a bold series are available.  
Perhaps this could be achieved by adding a few lines to each of the
*.mfd files.

> PS I didn't look at the new Mathematica package yet. Does it have
> an extensible font? If so, a comparison to xsb would be interesting. 

Three comments: 

1.  I'd like to remind you that I suggested  a name change last week
to the effect of

    Times/Symbol -> x sy a,b,c		(rather than xta, ...)
    Mathematica  -> x mm a,b,c,d,e 	(rather than xsa, ...)

While xt... for Times might be OK, I find it very confusing to refer
to the MMa version as xs...

2.  To answer your question: The new Mma package does consist of four
fonts covering OT1, OMl, OMS, OMX in the lower half and extra symbols
in the upper half.  Interestingly, the extension font is constructed
by combining a normal and a scaled version of Math2, so that the four
sizes of big delimiters cover the usual sizes 12pt, 18pt, 24pt, 30pt
rather than just taking the four sizes provided in Math2.

3.  The upper half of the MMa extension font includes a few of the
Mma-specifc extra glyphs including over/under parens/brackets/angles
from Math4.   Perhaps these might find a place in our MX1 encoding?

Cheers, Ulrik.