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Re: revised report of EuroTeX math font BOF




Hi Thierry,

> i'm very pessimistic about what could be a `plain tex interace' as a
> typical plain tex file may contain things like {\textfont0\char124} or
> \mathchardef\decimalsep\if@french"013B\else"013A\fi
> 
> In other words, plain has no font selection scheme, hence any use of
> non standard encodings with plain _replacing_ normal ones breaks
> virtually any file not prepared to deal with that encoding. 

True, but I'm not worried about files that intend to use the old
encoding at all. I just want to say

	\input newmath 
	....
	\bye

And have all of the glyphs & extensions available to me. Of 
course, newmath.tex will have to redefine some of the stuff that
is in plain.tex, but that is a trivial exercise in comparison.

Copying the whole nfss2 into plain.tex is not what I'm after, but if 
you want to use \decimalsep or whatever, somewhere along the line 
there has to have been a \mathchardef for it.

> This said, context has a font selection scheme (at least, there are no
> default fonts, and the user has to \input the relevant font- files) so
>  i think it's usefull to have a context interface. 

Actually, context still lacks a real, full-blown math interface like 
amslatex. Since it is fairly simple to separate the \mathchardefs
from the user interface, this is what I will do, resulting in a couple 
of separate files:

	newmath.tex   -- generic macros and \chardefs
	nmnames.tex   -- font tfm specs file for plain
	font-nm.tex   -- font tfm specs file for context
	supp-mat.tex  -- user interface for context
	
> What could be done for tex users is providing the new symbols by
> installing more families (like amssym.def/tex).

As I intended.

Greetings,  Taco
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Taco Hoekwater                                        texhelp@wkap.nl
Kluwer Academic Publishers                            -- Pre Press --
Achterom 119, 3311 KB Dordrecht, The Netherlands  tel.  31-78-6392550
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