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Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Sun, 28 Feb 1999 15:51:09 +0100
text/plain (109 lines)

 > It occured to me some while back that there is a need for some kind of
 > "safe" font selection commands---where "safe" is to be interpreted as with
 > the safe file commands \InputIfFileExists etcetera---in LaTeX. Safe font
 > commands would provide the ability to test if a font is available before
 > actually trying to typeset anything in it, and thus also the ability to
 > take some alternative action should the font not be available.

LaTeX already does have this feature if you think about, part of the font
selection mechanism was done explicitly to provide this

 > I know that this is more complicated with fonts than it is with input
 > files, since there is in general no way of testing if there is a TFM file
 > for the font in question short of actually trying to load the font (and I
 > don't think that can be used in general since it results in a visible error
 > message if the result of the test is false). One can however check if there
 > is a font definition file which defines the font in question, so that is
 > what I suggest the safe font commands should do.

there exists a trick to test for a font by going into \batchmode and loading
it and then checking if you got \nullfont as a result. the problem with this
approach (if you don't use eTeX) is that a) there is no way to be sure which
mode was in use (and \batchmode and friends are global operations) and b) it
uses a fair amount of string pool etc. the latter is unfortunately also true
if you try loading a normal file.

 > One example of how to use them is to make a command that typesets some
 > symbol if that symbol is available and which typesets some fake of it
 > otherwise.
 > [...]

what's wrong with using the \DeclareTextSymbolDefault (and friends) for that
purpose? that is exactly doing what you ask for as far as i can see.

eg instead of

 >   \DeclareRobustCommand\euro{%
 >      \UseTextSymbolIFE{TS1}{\texteuro}{EUR}%
 >   }

you could

 \DeclareTextCommandDefault\texteuro{some definition}

and then your statement:
 > to get a \euro command that gives something understandable regardless of
 > whether it is typeset on a site with or without a TS1 encoded symbol font.

holds as well.

the catch is that this works best if TS1 is something that is either there
(for all fonts) or not there at all. if it is there only for a small fraction
of the fonts then the scheme using Defaults works less good than the proposed

In particular it works not very well in the current situation where the TS1 is
effectively ony correctly implemented in CM fonts while all the PS fonts
contain huge gaps in the encodings that claim to be TS1.

BUT ... in my opinion there error here lies in calling those font encodings
TS1. My approach would be to distangle TS1 into several sub-encodings, eg

 TSA = Text Symbol Adobe basics
 TSX = Text Symbol Adobe basics + expert
 TS1 = Text Symbol as defined by Joerg

with those encodings being TSA < TSX < TS1

and a change in textcomp to allow loading a subset

This needs some further thoughts i'm sure but the current situation is not
good where the problem appears only at the printing stage (and it does violate
the invariant of the encoding, ie that 2 fonts in the same encoding produce
the same glyph set)


I'm not saying that the proposed test commands for certain font
characteristics aren't worth having, but i think they should not be used to
handle something like \textdegree or \texteuro on a large scale. The amount of
processing etc would be extremely high and i think this is fixing the symptoms
of a (one of the) problem(s) with NFSS2 instead of providing the right basic
interfaces for that problem.

 > It seems to me that much of the code needed to implement these commands
 > already exists in the LaTeX kernel, in particular in \define@newfont and
 > \try@load@fontshape, so it should not have to be that much work
 > implementing them. (It should reside in the kernel, since one place one
 > might want to use these commands are in the definitions in an encoding
 > definition file, and such files cannot load a package (which would have
 > been the alternative place to define these commands) because the fontenc
 > package loads such files during option processing.)

code like this should eventually reside in the kernel but the kernel of
LaTeX2e is frozen in this respect (and so are the interfaces for .fd and
enc.def files for 2e), ie we do not intend to extend it incrementally so that
we get to a situation where documents running 2e maintenance release X don't
work on maintenance release X-1

In my opinion it is time to start thinking about the errors and problems with
the NFSS2 approach and start experiments for developing NFSS3 but the first
step for doing this should be via experimental packages that one has to load
in the document somehow (ie either in a class file or in the preamble)