irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide) (01/17/88)
The glyphs representing the three extra Swedish characters "o with
dots", "a with dots", and "a with circle" look extremely ugly in TeX.
Somehow I have the feeling that non-Swedes think of these characters
as special instance of the letters "o" and "a". That is just as wrong
as describing the letter "E" as a special instance of "F" (who in
his right mind would describe an "E" as "an F with an underbar" ??).
The three letters I refer to are totally separate entities and Swedish
keyboards have special keys for them. Historically, of course, the
special characters I'm discussing developed from "oe","ae", and "ao",
but that was many centuries ago and today there is nobody who remebers
this and the characters are treated on equal footing as the rest (a-z).
In fact, in "normal" Swedish we always replace "w" by "v" - how
would you Anglo-Saxons like if we replaced all your "w"s by "v"s?
Looking at TeX printouts you see that the dots and the rings are
placed *very* high above the "o"s and the "a"s whereas in Swedish typography
they are placed so low that they almost touch the "o"s and "a"s.
This gives you the impression of that the people who contructed the TeX
glyphs representing the characters in question (erroneously) thought that
these dots/rings are some sort of diactricals. This is not so and my question
is:
Is there anbody out there who has created Swedish natinal characters with
the correct typographical look? If so, please reply here or by e-mail.
-Bo
--
>>> Bo Thide', Swedish Institute of Space Physics, S-755 90 Uppsala, Sweden <<< Phone (+46) 18-300020. Telex: 76036 (IRFUPP S). UUCP: ..enea!kuling!irfu!btsimpson@trwrb.UUCP (Scott Simpson) (01/20/88)
I don't think most Americans think that the A with a circle on
top is an accented character so I think your generalization is
unjustified. What seems to be the problem is that you are using
an American version of TeX when you should be using a Swedish
version. For example, would you use the regular old plain TeX
to typeset arabic? Of course not. You couldn't. Maybe someone
has made a Swedish version of TeX you can use. You can check
TUGboat.
Since you are Swedish, I'll take your word for it that
the letters look lousy. We don't speak a hell of a lot of
Swedish here in America so the error is somewhat understandable.
This is not a flame. (Although the appearance of such a disclaimer
is somewhat paradoxical).
--
Scott Simpson
TRW Space and Defense Sector
...{decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax}!trwrb!simpson (UUCP)
trwrb!simpson@trwind.trw.com (ARPA)irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide) (01/24/88)
In article <4563@trwrb.UUCP> simpson@trwrb.dsd.trw.com.UUCP (Scott Simpson) writes: >I don't think most Americans think that the A with a circle on >top is an accented character so I think your generalization is >unjustified. You are probably right, but most American physicicst colleagues I've met think that Angstrom is spelled this way... >an American version of TeX when you should be using a Swedish >version. For example, would you use the regular old plain TeX >to typeset arabic? We have a Swedish version of TeX. But that's not the point. Plain TeX provides umalut-o (o with two dots on top). This letter is used in many languages where it simply does not look right. I have heard this comment not only from Swedes but also from people who speak Finnish and German. I don't know what a Turk would say. I doubt that the "ugly" umlaut-o is acceptable in any language where it's needed. If so, there is no justification for its existence in TeX at all. Most likely, it was included in order to let all plain TeX users have the possibility to write Swedish, German, Finnish, Turkish(?), etc words typographically correct (this is not so for Arabic, so your comparison doesn't make much sense to me). Hence, a correction of its design in TeX is called for. In fact, as a result of my earlier posting I got such a correction e-mailed from somebody in Switzerland who had the same opinion as me. I have not had time to test his version yet. I also got in contact with some other Swedes working on the same problem so there is a good chance there will be a solution soon. Anyway, thanks for your comments. -Bo Thid\'e (in TeX ...) -- >>> Bo Thide', Swedish Institute of Space Physics, S-755 90 Uppsala, Sweden <<< Phone (+46) 18-300020. Telex: 76036 (IRFUPP S). UUCP: ..enea!kuling!irfu!bt