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Re: Thoughts

Thierry Bouche:

> another thing, about radicals again. A friend of mine, typographer in
> the outer (xpress) world was very surprized by tex's behaviour to use
> PS rules for building the extensible part of the radical (instead of a
> glyph). I think his remark had to do with resolution dependant PS
> yielding an inconsistent result in a PDF viewed on screen. However, it
> seems obvious that a rule construct cannot be hinted, although a small
> bar could be: is there any good reason to have tex compute the rule
> geometry rather than just putting enough small overlapping bars as in
> some plain tex macro as \hrulefill (if memory serves) ?

I suppose the problem is that the use of a rule (as opposed to a
glpyh) in this case is hard-wired into TeX's typesetting algorithms
and cannot easily be changed without going for e-TeX or NTS.  

BTW, the Mathematica fonts do have a set of glyphs for this purpose,
actually four glyphs to match the four sizes of raised radicals.

Adding such glyphs to the extension font would be easy, but it doesn't
make sense to do so as long as TeX won't make any use of it.

Cheers, Ulrik.