Re: Lucida Fonts in teTeX

Reinhard Kotucha <[email protected]> writes:

> >>>>> "Vaughan" == Vaughan Clarkson <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>     > I'm also a little confused as to whether it is appropriate to
>     > continue to discuss this problem in this forum, or whether I
>     > should now take this up privately with Mr. Schmidt.
> 
> Yes, ask Walter to make T1 encoding the default in lucidabr.sty.

The problem is that

a) it is not the business of font providing packages to play around
with document defaults
b) LaTeX defaults to OT1 encoding.  And for Americans, this is pretty
much sufficient, and also tends to leads to visually more appealing
fonts (not too rarely, even avoiding bitmap fonts) where the Computer
Modern family is concerned.

As long as OT1 remains the default encoding of LaTeX (and there are
reasons in font availability that would make it imprudent to change
that currently), I think it will lead to more work dealing with the
resulting bug reports than keeping the respective font files will
mean.

As something comparable, there are lots of style files flying around
derived from ancient LaTeX styles that say something like

\def\figure{\@float{newfigurecode}}
\let\endfigure\@endfloat

something like that.  The problem is that if some subsequent package
redefines both \@float and \@endfloat, the redefinition of the latter
will get lost.  So this is a bug that hampers a lot of style files
trying to adjust float behavior.

It also hampers preview-latex.  After telling half a dozen people that
they should pester their different respective class file providers to
fix that bug (classes which sometimes have gone unmaintained for
years), I just decided I've had it.  preview.sty now detects those
definitions, issues a large diatribe about it as a warning, patches
around the deficiency (which could cause problems in itself) and the
bug reports stopped.  This means that some classes will never get
fixed.  Somebody else's problem.

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do something suboptimal
for keeping your peace.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum