Hi!

 >> <...> Let me add to this that I today checked a number of books
 >> printed in the 1930s in Sweden; I also checked a Swedish-Russian
 >> dictionary and the official Swedish dictionary (SAOL). They all
 >> have a gap between the A and the ring; the gap is usually quite
 >> tiny, though, always smaller than the distance between a lower
 >> case a and the ring, and sometimes hard to see in smaller type
 >> sizes unless one looks very carefully at the letter in question.
 >>
 >> /Lars Engebretsen

 > Thank you, Lars!

 > That is what I was looking for: how the traditional Aring glyph
 > looked like before the beginning of the computer era ;-)

You seem to be ignoring comments from other people (Lars Hellström and
Harald Hanche-Olsen) who have some other experience.

 > I fully agree with your opinion (expressed in one of the earlier
 > letters) that the glyph design is dependent only on the style of
 > the whole font and its aspects, and wrote the same to Vladimir
 > Volovich.

I'm not arguing against this statement: the design of all glyphs,
including the Aring glyph, is dependent only on the style of the whole
font and its aspects.

We are discussing the case when there is NO Aring glyph in the LaTeX
font encoding, such as OT1 or T2A font encoding.

In this case, we HAVE TO construct the Aring glyph "artificially", and
we have two ways of doing that: either just apply the ring to A using
an \accent command, or put the ring closer to A using the approach
currently used in ot1enc.def.

There are valid arguments to do the latter, as Lars Hellström and
Harald Hanche-Olsen pointed out.

 > BTW, I tried to build the \AA glyph for four fonts from
 > AntiquaPSCyr family using the strict standard LaTeX algorithms
 > (with the special definition for \AA glyph), and found an ugly
 > appearance in some cases because I can see an upper part of the A
 > letter inside the ring.

May it be the result of incorrect metric for A and/or ring glyphs?

 > So, the special definition is good for CM fonts and maybe for some
 > other fonts,

Do you have a complete list of "other fonts"? Wouldn't it look ugly if
we were dependant on font families in the generic encoding definition
files?

 > but is definitely not good for an arbitrary font.  That's why I
 > would propose to restrict the application of the special definition
 > of \AA only to CM and CM-related fonts.

I see no way to do that properly.

Remember, we are discussing the case when the font encoding does not
contain the pre-built Aring glyph (in case it does contain that glyph,
it's appearance is in the hands of font designer).

Best,
v.