Re: blot_diameter

[Juergen Reuter]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> ...
> Good !  I've put in the patch, and, at the same time split out all
> ancient entries into a separate font: tex fonts (and PS fonts as well)
> can only have 256 glyphs. Almost half of the feta font was taken up by
> the various ancient glyphs.
>

Interesting.  I had no problems to compile the feta fonts with more than
256 characters.  I even sucessfully produced proof sheets via gftodvi,
which, IIRC, contained all (i.e. >256) characters.  It was really not
before lily crashed with the cited assertion failure that I recognized any
problem.

Maybe my teTeX distribution overrides MF's last_text_char constant for
this purpose?

"...
In order to accommodate this difference, we shall use the name |text_char|
to stand for the data type of the characters that are converted to and
from |ASCII_code| when they are input and output. We shall also assume
that |text_char| consists of the elements |chr(first_text_char)| through
|chr(last_text_char)|, inclusive. The following definitions should be
adjusted if necessary.

first_text_char=0 {ordinal number of the smallest element of |text_char|}
last_text_char=255 {ordinal number of the largest element of |text_char|}

..."

Anyway, how do you handle 16 bit unicode characters in PostScript?

And, FYI, if you look at D.E.Knuth's Pre-fascicle 2a of The Art of
Computer Programming, volume 4 (see
http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/fasc2a.ps.gz), you will see lots of
Chinese, Arabian and Hebrew characters (e.g. on page 65).  There are some
thousand Chinese characters, but I can not imagine that Knuth switches
between dozens of fonts just to print a single name...

Greetings,
Juergen