Re: ISO-8859-1

[Karl Berry]

    What specific issues are there that make
    you want to design the accents into the font?  Is the height of accented
    capital letters the main problem?

Not the main problem, although that might be part of it.  Here's what
comes to mind:

1) TeX will not do hyphenation on words containing \accent's.  This by
   itself makes it imperative to have preaccented letters (catcode 11).

2) it would be quite hard to make a general \accent actually place every
   needed accent correctly over every needed letters.  There are always
   some cases that don't fit the usual positioning algorithms.

3) it is much nicer to have a normal keyboard character correspond to an
   actual character in a font, at the right position, so it just works,
   instead of having to make it be active (catcode 13) and do the right
   thing with a macro.  Macros get expanded in all kinds of
   troublemaking circumstances.

The largest/newest font set I know of is Latin Modern, which has all the
earlier Computer Modern (and European Modern etc.) characters, and more.
In TeX Live 2003, this is more or less the default.
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/lm/