Re: [Texmacs-dev] Italic font display with TeXmacs 1.0.4-R2

[bump]

> B.t.w.: a just heard from Martin Peters from Springer-Verlag that
> you mentioned TeXmacs in your new book. Thanks a lot for this:
> this kind of promotion will certainly make it easier to get
> TeXmacs accepted as a standard format by publishers.

It is important for me to write in TeXmacs since I am much more
efficient. However the production department at Springer-NY
had no experience with it.

A principal problem was that they objected to the presence of
Type 3 fonts in the exported postscript files. The Adobe
software their compositor uses is broke (perhaps by design
on the part of Adobe) for Type 3 fonts.

This is already a problem with TeX, of course, whose typical
drivers use Type 3 fonts. For TeX, there is pdftex and
pdflatex. For TeXmacs I understand that this has been
improved by the support for pdf in TeXmacs 1.0.3 but there
are still problems. For example, TeXmacs uses the bbm fonts
by design, and these are not available as Type 1 fonts.  The
ams blackboard bold fonts are available as Type 1 fonts.

The figures are made with Metapost and included TeX fonts. Of
course these were Type 3 fonts. They told me included Type 3
fonts in the figures are not a problem and ``we have no idea why.''

TeXmacs 1.0.3 was not available when the book was starting to
get final. Because of the font problem, and because Springer
wanted to use their svmono.cls style files, I decided to work
with the exported LaTeX file. I ended up doing quite a bit of
editing of the exported .tex file while continuing to write
in TeXmacs. For this reason I maintained a patch containing
the differences between the exported latex file and the
edited one.

One thing that I do not like about TeXmacs' exported latex
file is that uses utf encoding to represent letters with
umlauts and accents. This seems undesirable and asking
for portability trouble, and unnecessary since tex has a
perfectly good scheme to represent these in plain ascii.

Daniel Bump