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TeXmacs fonts |  |
1.
The way TeXmacs handles fonts is quite different from classical text editors and even from TeX. Let us first analyze some classical ways of conceiving fonts.
- Physical fonts are just given by the name of a file, which contains a character set, i.e. a list of bitmaps. Usually the size of a character set is limited by 256 (or 65536).
- True type fonts essentially work in the same way, except that the bitmaps can now be computed for any desired size.
- In the X-window system, the name of the font is replaced by a more systematic name, which explicitly contains a certain number of font parameters, such as its size, series and shape. This makes it easier for applications to select an appropriate font. However, character sets are still limited in size.
- In TeX, symbols are seen as commands, which select an appropriate physical font (which corresponds to a .tfm and a .pk file), based on symbol font declarations and environment variables (such as size, series and shape).
Clearly, among all these methods, TeX provides the largest flexibility. However, philosophically speaking, we think that it also has some drawbacks:
- There is no distinction between usual commands and commands to make symbols: the current time might be considered as a symbol.
- The encoding of the font is fixed by the names of the commands. For instance, for mathematical symbols, no clean general encoding scheme is provided, except the default naming of symbols by commands.
- For beginners, it remains extremely hard to use non standard fonts.
Actually, in TeX, the notion of “the current font” is ill-defined: it is merely the superposition of all character generating commands.
2.
Philosophically speaking, we think that a font should be characterized by the following two essential properties:
- A font associates graphical meanings to words. The words can always be represented by strings.
- The way this association takes place is coherent as a function of the word.
By a word, we either mean a word in a natural language, or a sequence of mathematical, technical or artistic symbols.
This way of viewing fonts has several advantages:
- A font may take care of kerning and ligatures.
- A font may consist of several “physical fonts”, which are somehow merged together.
- A font might in principle automatically build very complicated glyphs like hieroglyphs or large delimiters from words in a well chosen encoding.
- A font is an irreductable and persistent entity, not a bunch of commands whose actions may depend on some environement.
Notice finally that the “graphical meaning” of a word might be more than just a bitmap: it might also contain some information about a logical bounding box, appropriate places for scripts, etc. Similarly, the “coherence of the association” should be interpreted in its broadest sense: the font might contain additional information for the global typesetting of the words on a page, like the recommended distance between lines, the height of a fraction bar, etc.
3.
All text strings in TeXmacs consist of sequences of either specific or universal symbols. A specific symbol is a character, different from '\0', '<' and '>'. Its meaning may depend on the particular font which is being used. A universal symbol is a string starting with '<', followed by an arbitrary sequence of characters different from '\0', '<' and '>', and ending with '>'. The meaning of universal characters does not depend on the particular font which is used, but different fonts may render them in a different way.
Universal symbols can also be used to represent mathematical symbols of variable sizes like large brackets. The point here is that the shapes of such symbols depend on certain size parameters, which can not conveniently be thought of as font parameters. This problem is solved by letting the extra parameters be part of the symbol. For instance, "<left-(-1>" would be usual bracket and "<left-(-2>" a slightly larger one.
4.
The main abstract font class is defined in font.hpp:
struct font_rep: rep<font> {
display dis; // underlying display
encoding enc; // underlying encoding of the font
SI design_size; // design size in points/256
SI display_size; // display size in points/PIXEL
double slope; // italic slope
space spc; // usual space between words
space extra; // extra space at end of words
SI y1; // bottom y position
SI y2; // top y position
SI yfrac; // vertical position fraction bar
SI ysub; // base line for subscripts
SI ysup; // base line for superscripts
SI wpt; // width of one point in font
SI wquad; // wpt * design size in points
SI wunit; // unit width for extendable fonts
SI wfrac; // width fraction bar
SI wsqrt; // width horzontal line in square root
SI wneg; // width of negation line
font_rep (display dis, string name);
font_rep (display dis, string name, font fn);
void copy_math_pars (font fn);
virtual void get_extents (string s, text_extents& ex) = 0;
virtual void draw (ps_device dev, string s, SI x, SI y) = 0;
virtual SI get_sub_base (string s);
virtual SI get_sup_base (string s);
virtual double get_left_slope (string s);
virtual double get_right_slope (string s);
virtual SI get_left_correction (string s);
virtual SI get_right_correction (string s);
virtual SI get_lsub_correction (string s, double level);
virtual SI get_lsup_correction (string s, double level);
virtual SI get_rsub_correction (string s, double level);
virtual SI get_rsup_correction (string s, double level);
void var_get_extents (string s, text_extents& ex);
void var_draw (ps_device dev, string s, SI x, SI y);
virtual bitmap_char get_bitmap (string s);
};
The main abstract routines are get_extents and draw. The first routine determines the logical and physical bounding boxes of a graphical representation of a word, the second one draws the string on the the screen.
The additional data are used for global typesetting using the font. The other virtual routines are used for determening additional properties of typesetted strings.
5.
Several types of concrete fonts have been implemented in TeXmacs:
- TeX text fonts
- See src/Resource/Fonts/tex_font.cc.
- TeX rubber fonts
- See src/Resource/Fonts/tex_rubber_font.cpp.
- X fonts
- See src/Resource/Fonts/ps_font.cpp.
- Mathematical fonts
- See src/Resource/Fonts/math_font.cpp.
- Virtual fonts
- See src/Resource/Fonts/virtual_font.cpp.
In most cases, the lowest layer of the implementation consists of a collection of bitmaps, together with some font metric information. The font is responsable for putting these bitmaps together on the screen using some appropriate spacing. The ps_device class comes with a method to display bitmaps in a nice, anti-aliased way, or to print them out.
6.
After having implemented fonts themselves, an important remaining
issue is the selection of the appropriate font as a function of a
certain number of parameters, such as its name, series, shape and
size. For optimal flexibility, TeXmacs comes with a powerful
macro-based font-selection scheme (using the
At the lowest level, we provide a fixed number of macros which directly correspond to the above types of concrete fonts. For instance, the macro
(tex $name $size $dpi)
corresponds to the constructor
font tex_font (display dis, string fam, int size, int dpi, int dsize=10);
of a TeX text font.
At the middle level, it is possible to specify some rewriting rules like
((roman rm medium right $s $d) (ec ecrm $s $d))
((avant-garde rm medium right $s $d) (tex rpagk $s $d 0))
((x-times rm medium right $s $d) (ps adobe-times-medium-r-normal $s $d))
When a left hand pattern is matched, it is recursively substituted by the right hand side. The files in the directory progs/fonts contain a large number of rewriting rules.
At the top level, TeXmacs calls a macro of the form
($name $family $series $shape $size $dpi)
as a function of the current environment in the text. In the future, the top level macro call might change in order to enable the user to let the font depend on other environment variables.