[comp.text.tex] ISO Latin 1 and Computer Modern fonts

gjditchfield@watmsg.uwaterloo.ca (Glen Ditchfield) (09/27/90)

In article <FJ.90Sep25153811@indigo.iesd.auc.dk> fj@iesd.auc.dk (Frank Jensen) writes:
>
>I am looking for virtual font files for Knuth's Computer Modern fonts.
>
>They should have an ISO 8859/1 (Latin 1) layout, and they should
>contain reasonable kerning data for character pairs where one or both
>characters are accented (but since TeX doesn't kern between such
>characters anyway, I can live without for the moment).
>
>[The advantage of having such virtual fonts is that it's easier to
>type non-english text and that you can have correct hyphenation for
>non-english languages (without resorting to incantations like
>`german.sty' does).]

In the long run, would it be a good idea to replace the Computer Modern
fonts with fonts that have all of the ISO Latin 1 printing characters in
the positions defined for them by Latin 1, and with the non-printing
character positions filled up with useful glyphs like ligatures and
characters from other ISO Latin character sets?
   If anyone out there has a keyboard that lets them type in the full
Latin 1 character set, could they answer the following questions: how do
you type in "no-break space" (octal 240) and "soft hyphen" (octal 255), and
what appears on your screen if you do?

    Glen Ditchfield  gjditchfield@violet.uwaterloo.ca  Office: DC 2517
Dept. of Computer Science, U of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
	      These opinions have not been tested on animals.

dhosek@frigga.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.) (09/28/90)

In article <1990Sep27.155156.4352@watmath.waterloo.edu>, gjditchfield@watmsg.uwaterloo.ca (Glen Ditchfield) writes...
>In article <FJ.90Sep25153811@indigo.iesd.auc.dk> fj@iesd.auc.dk (Frank Jensen) writes:
>In the long run, would it be a good idea to replace the Computer Modern
>fonts with fonts that have all of the ISO Latin 1 printing characters in
>the positions defined for them by Latin 1, and with the non-printing
>character positions filled up with useful glyphs like ligatures and
>characters from other ISO Latin character sets?

There is a draft 256-character character set that came out of the
TeX90 conference at Cork. It is inadequate since it doesn't leave
anywhere near enough empty glyphs for quality typesetting (the
f-ligs of cm are not the full set of possible roman ligatures and
variants, especially for italic typefaces or oldstyle typefaces).

>   If anyone out there has a keyboard that lets them type in the full
>Latin 1 character set, could they answer the following questions: how do
>you type in "no-break space" (octal 240) and "soft hyphen" (octal 255), and
>what appears on your screen if you do?

On the VT340 that I'm typing on right now, NBSP appears as a space
( ) and SHY as a hyphen (-). They're typed as compose-space-space
and compose-hyphen-hyphen respectively.

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