Re: Hello from GNU Press

[Simon Law]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 09:43:06AM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Perhaps someone could comment on my implementation 
> 
> Yes, I have a lot of comments :).

        Oh good.  I hope you don't mind that I move this to bug-texinfo,
where other people can view this discussion.

> By the law, maybe you'd like to be on the texinfo-pretest list?  It's
> low volume, but it's where I announce pretests and ask for advice on new
> features, etc.

        By the law?  I'm not familiar with that idiom.

        But I'd like to be on this list.

> First (and smallest) of all, don't worry about the silly \bigger
> conditional.  That is just historical junk and should be eradicated.

        OK then.

> - I don't think the long list of actual commands should be in the
>   subsidiary file.  That's too hard to maintain.  The other approach
>   you mentioned sounds much better, of having commands in texinfo.tex
>   to do the work (\setrmfonts, etc.).  Then choosing the font becomes a
>   matter of stating the prefixes.
> 
> - It seems it would be be better to do the math fonts in the same way
>   as everything else (\setmathfonts{zppler}) instead of issuing actual
>   font commands.

        I agree.  As I said, this is a working proof-of-concept and by
no means polished.

> - it would be better not to have subsidiary files at all.  The reason
>   is that there's no way make install can install them by default,
>   because there's no way (I can think of) to guess the right texmf root.

        We could just assume that everybody follows the TDS.  Then we
just install everything under texmf/tex/texinfo

        I'm afraid that we may have to start splitting files like this
apart.  There are an arbitrarily large number of fonts, and I don't
think that smashing each font's idiosyncrasies into texinfo.tex is a
good idea.

> - If we do end up with subsidiary files, `palatino.sty' is probably the
>   wrong name.  Instead, it should be `ppl.tfd' or something.

        I was using palatino.tex since PSFNSS uses palatino.sty.  One
could conceivably use ppl.tex (or whatever suffix we really want), but I
consider that less than user-friendly.

> - Arguing in the alternative, perhaps we should use the existing plnfss
>   macros.  I looked at them, they are not too hairy, but exactly how the
>   integration would work is not clear to me.
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/vietnamese/vntex/tex/plain/plnfss/

        I'd love to do that, especially since they've already done a lot
of the hard work.  (You do mean PSNFSS and not PLNFSS, right?)  If we
could place a compatibility layer between us and the LaTeX macros, that
would be ideal.

> - I'll append a message I wrote a few weeks ago about a possible
>   interface to changing fonts in Texinfo, by defining some new commands
>   (instead of using @input, which by the way would have to be wrapped in
>   @iftex or something; I'd rather do something higher level.)

        My current implementation is completely ignored by makeinfo in
info mode.  Of course, this could possibly be a side-effect, so I would
be happy to make it cleaner.

        Looking at your proposed system, I see that it is rather along
the vein of where I wanted to go.  However, I'd like to suggest that we
split Metafont and PostScript font sizes.  Why?  Because almost all
PostScript fonts should be scaled "at f00pt" while Metafont fonts should
still be scaled according to magsteps.

> - It would be nice to allow for different encodings as well.  This would
>   be a start towards supporting typesetting in other languages in a
>   natural way.

        I agree; but have no idea how encodings work in TeX.  Sadly,
I've only hacked TeX for two years, and don't quite grok it yet.

> What do you think?

        I think I have a lot of hacking to do.  *grin*

Simon

> ...
> 
> I finally took some time today to consider a font scheme for Texinfo.
> One goal is to support PostScript fonts (better pdf's, aside from
> matters of taste); another goal is to support differently-encoded fonts,
> so we can finally typeset something other than English with a chance for
> hyphenation.
> 
> Also, I'd like to have something which has a chance of being implemented
> in LaTeX (that is, makeinfo could output latex at some point) without
> too much pain.
> 
> So here is my first idea for the document-level commands:
>   @fontfamily roman ptm
>   @fontfamily sans phv
>   @fontfamily typewriter pcr
>   @fontfamily math zptmcmr
> 
> Then we must consider the encoding (perhaps this can be inferred from
> the @documentlanguage, I don't know enough to say):
>   @fontencoding text 8t
> 
> Each one of the family names expands into fonts for several shapes.  For
> instance, the above implies the following (see complete list below):
>   @fontdef ss phvr8t
>   @fontdef ssb phvro8t
> 
> Finally, controlling the font sizes:
>   @fontsize smaller 800
>   @fontsize small 900
>   @fontsize main 1000
>   @fontsize subsection 1315
>   @fontsize section 1440
>   @fontsize chapter 1728
>   @fontsize title 2074
> 
> This doesn't handle text symbols, so that bullets and copyrights (and
> ...?) can be taken from the right place.  I think something like this
> will suffice for that:
>   @fontencoding textsymbol 8r
> Except I'm not sure how the EC text companion
> fonts will work out yet.
> 
> Thoughts?  I'm going to ask the tex-fonts mailing list for advice, too.
> 
> Thanks,
> karl
> 
> 
> Putting it all together ...
> 
> @fontencodingtext 8t
> @fontencoding textsymbol 8r
> 
> @fontfamily roman ptm
> @fontfamily sans phv
> @fontfamily typewriter pcr
> @fontfamily math zptmcmr
> 
> @fontsize smaller 800
> @fontsize small 900
> @fontsize main 1000
> @fontsize subsection 1315
> @fontsize section 1440
> @fontsize chapter 1728
> @fontsize title 2074
> 
> @fontdef rm ptmr8t
> @fontdef rmb ptmb8t
> @fontdef b ptmb8t
> @fontdef bx ptmb8t
> @fontdef it ptmri8t
> @fontdef itb ptmbi8t
> @fontdef sl ptmro8t
> @fontdef slb ptmbo8t
> @fontdef sc ptmrc8t
> @fontdef scb ptmbc8t
> 
> @fontdef ss phvr8t
> @fontdef ssb phvro8t
> 
> @fontdef tt pcrr8t
> @fontdef ttb pcrb8t
> @fontdef ttsl pcrro8t
> 
> @fontdef mi zptmcmr7m
> @fontdef sy zptmcmr7y