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Re: rsfs slant problems

At 09:22 AM 98/03/19 +0100, Laurent Siebenmann wrote:

>I have never understood why TUG fonts are, like CM, on
>principle, cram-full, thereby preventing upward compatible
>evolution.
>
>In the CM case, it was (yes?) because Knuth did not trust you
>to assure worthy evolution of his CM fonts.  Since you surely
>trust yourselves, why not leave many characters undefined and
>add more characters, say once a decade? Time flies: if this
>policy had been followed with the Cork 1989, norm, it would
>already be time to debate an upward compatible revision.

While I am in favour of leaving some slots for desperately needed
additions later,  (like the missing ogonek composites in T1),
I have to also say that this creates horrible nightmares:

For example, the euro character is now going into slot 128 in 
Windows ANSI which means all fonts ought to be revised and
all software (They also added Zcaron and zcaron for unknown
reason).  And if we look at the HP 4000, we find a whole mess
of incompatbilities resulting from various levels of support
for f-ligatures in the TTF files compared to the corresponding
built-in printer fonts (the TTF files have *no* f-ligatiures, some
printer fonts have the ideal ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl others have none,
some have fi and fl).

Open slots lead to such problems in future.