Return-Path: Sender: (Vladimir Volovich) To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 17:20:43 +0300 Message-ID: X-Original-Return-Path: Received: from faun.nada.kth.se ([130.237.222.80] verified) by vsu.ru (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.1.8) with ESMTP id 6069515; Tue, 10 Feb 2004 04:14:55 +0300 Received: (from enge@localhost) by faun.nada.kth.se (8.12.10/8.12.1) id i1A1E7Qb003743; Tue, 10 Feb 2004 02:14:07 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: faun.nada.kth.se: enge set sender to enge@nada.kth.se using -f X-Original-To: "Cyrillic TeX Users Group" X-Original-Cc: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru, fontinst@tug.org, hanche@math.ntnu.no, Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se, swan@scon155.phys.msu.su, tex-fonts@math.utah.edu, texhax@tug.org Subject: Re: [tex-fonts] Re: [texhax] On the proper look of the \AA References: From: Lars Engebretsen X-Original-Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 02:14:06 +0100 In-Reply-To: (Vladimir Volovich's message of "Mon, 19 Jan 2004 22:09:19 +0300") X-Original-Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.3 (usg-unix-v) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable (Vladimir Volovich) writes: > you mean that e.g. to achieve the "gapless Aring" using the \accent > command, it would be possible to put the ring accent somewhat lower? > are you sure that this approach will work properly for both small and > capital letters? > > (If it would be possible to do that, i wonder then why Don Knuth > didn't use this approach when he wanted to create a special look for > the Aring glyph. And why did he decide to make Aring a special case in > the first place) This discussion is a bit old now, but I though that I'd share my thoughs on this last question with you. We can, of course, only speculate about the real reason Knuth made Aring a special case. I have a few guesses: 1) Generally, a font should have both "normal" accents, suitable for lower case letters, and "capital" accents, suitable for upper case letters. For instance, the acute accent should probably be more horizontal in its upper case version. Now, it was (is?) an accepted practice to not write accents on upper case letters in, e.g., French, and the diaeresis accent does not occupy much vertical space, so for most Plain TeX accents it did not matter that there are no designated upper case accents. The Aring glyph, however, was somehow important enough to catch Knuth's attention. Maybe he considered the glyph primarily as the =C5ngstr=F6m symbol and not a "normal letter", since (as far as I know) he neglected support for uring in Plain TeX, a glyph needed (I think) for Czech. 2) The Aring glyph does not occur very often. As far as I know it exists only in Scandinavian languages and, moreover, it is very rare as a first letter in a word. In fact, it is mostly seen in titles on book or magazine covers or in advertisements, i.e., as part of a logotype. In this case it is not uncommon to see an attached ring, especially if the logo is based on a sans serif font (consider for instance the logotype of the Swedish department store =C5hl=E9ns). For running text, however, I maintain that the detached version is the norm. 3) It could be the case that the "Modern" typefaces normally had an attached ring, I don't know. I did not find any classical books printed in original "Modern" style typefaces. Hope this is of interest, /Lars