Re: Lucida Fonts in teTeX

>>>>> "George" == George N White <[email protected]> writes:

    > In defense of Walter and Thomas:

    > Users of free software must accept part of the burden of
    > tracking changes and learning how to debug problems.  Commercial
    > software often carries some onus to do the extra work to ensure
    > backwards compatibility, which always has a cost of increased
    > complexity and other overhead.  

This is not true in general.

1. There are many bugs in commercial software, but you cannot fix them
   because you don't have the sources.
2. Free software is much better supported.  For how many commercial
   products does a mailing list like this exist?
3. TeX developers are much more careful about backwards compatibility
   than anyone else.
4. There is probably no commercial typesetting program which offers so
   much flexibility as TeX.  This requires some knowledge, but the
   alternative is a lot of limitations.

    > For the free software community,
    > the time of people like Thomas and Walter is a scarce resource,
    > so we have to accept that dropping support for non-essential
    > features is desirable if it simplifies the code and saves
    > developer time in the long term.

I suppose that dropping OT1 support was desired by Walter.  The letter
"O" in OT1 stands for "old".  And it is now very old.

Maybe the .sty files which loads the Lucida fonts should select T1 as
a default encoding.  The user can override this value if he wants
something different, like LY1.  You can discuss this with Walter
<[email protected]>, it's free software and you'll certainly get a
response.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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