Re: Font naming rears its ugly head again

[Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.Ac.HMC.Edu>]

- Sorry, I should have been clearer about this!  There's been some
- discussion on the DC list about whether monowidth fonts should include
- -- and --- ligatures.  The current proposal is that -- should ligature
- to a number-range dash and --- should ligature to a puncutation dash.
- In many monowidth fonts, the number-range dash will look just like
- <hyphen> and the puncutation dash will look just like
- <hyphen><hyphen>.  This conforms to UK typing of correspondence... 

I did this in my CMPICA fonts. Only one spare glyph is needed
really. -- becomes a character which only looks like a hyphen but
has its own code. That plus a hyphen yields (guess what!)
something that looks like --.

However, I think that their is a real need to distinguish a
monospace font for text usage vs. a monospace font for listing
usage. The following characteristics (roughly speaking) should be
only in the former:
  --  == -
  --- == --
  '   == ' (straight single quote)
  `   == ' (straight single quote)
  ''  == " (straight double quote)
  ``  == " (straight double quote)
cf. cmpica.

What is really needed is TeX-settable encoding, kerning and
ligaturing.

Incidentally, an interesting note. I believe only TeX is capable
of ligatures along the lines of AB == DB which could have real
uses (e.g., a variant r in a sans serif font for the rn
combination which keeps it from looking too much like m. q.v. the
discussion in typo-l).

-dh