# Re: V0.4 details

• To: math-font-discuss@cogs.susx.ac.uk
• Subject: Re: V0.4 details
• From: Matthias Clasen <mclasen@sun2.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de>
• Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 09:37:58 +0200 (MET DST)
• Cc: Joerg.Knappen@uni-mainz.de

Joerg Knappen wrote:

>      The upright lowercase greek letters need some adjustments

I know, in the current version they are just `unslanted' italic letters.
Perhaps someone with more metafont experience could try to develop these

> xmb: I am surprised by the two square root signs, which are _smaller_
> MX1  than the default one. Personally, I find them rather irritating.
>      How do the other members of this forum feel?

Ulrik Vieth has already explained the reason for their inclusion: It is stated
somewhere in Justins report that moving the basic size radical from cmsy to
a cmex replacement implies adding three sizes, since the cmex replacement
should be loadable in just one size and still give the same results as the
old cmsy + cmex combination.

>     BTW, do the other mebers of this forum agree with the number and size
>     steps of the growing delimeters? Are they really all needed (I am in
>     doubt here)? An argument in favour of many sizes in one font could be,
>     that one only needs one xmb font for all point sizes. On the other
>     hand, TeX is not delimited by the absolute number of fonts loaded, but
>     by the number of math font families. Thus, a package like xscale
>     is just fine. It also resolves the problems with the many different
>     heights and depths.
>
>     There are some postings on the number of delimiter sizes in the
>     archives.

For the growing delimiters I have just copied the sizes from yhcmex, Yannis
Haralambous extension of cmex. I do not want to imply that these sizes should
all be included in a cmex replacement, just that there should be enough slots
to enable something like my xmb with lots of delimiter sizes. Seeing
yhcmex was my motivation for splitting MX.

Perhaps there should be a standard mechanism of communicating the \big,
\bigg, \Big, \Bigg etc sizes between the font and the macro level.

> xmc: What is the rationale to have a cedilla in mathematics?

Well, I just copied it from Justins report, but I had the same question.

> MSP
>     Why do you keep the tie accent in MSP? It was never designed for
>     use in mathematics (in fact, Knuth needed it to typeset \t\i\i
>     once in the TeXbook). It has a strange design (a glyph hanging out of
>     its bounding box) and isn't really workable. It is now part of the tc
>     fonts, which also contains now so-called new ties, which are inverted
>     breve accents in fact.

This is just a mistake of mine which I didn't find time to correct so far.

>     Since xmf contains an extensible (wide) triangle accent, maybe xmc
>     should contain the basic form of it?

I hope that I have placed the basic sizes of all new growing delimiters
in the MS2 encoding. My argument for that was that they are new, so they don't
have to be in the first four encodings, where slots are precious.

[...]

> xme: The scriptscriptstyle long arrows show visibile gaps in my printout and
> MS2  on the screen. Probably the pieces should have better overlap.

I have only done some trial-and-error on the \joinrel kerning to see if
replacing \joinrel with kerning works at all and I know that the values
currently do not work in the small sizes. I someone else has better values
or time to find them...

>     For the tortoise shell brackets, the vertical piece should be longer
>     and the diagonals should have an angle comparable to the angle of the
>     angualar brackets.

Yes.