[OS X TeX] Zapfino install progress, ``Peace on Earth'' card

[Will Robertson]

William F. Adams wrote:
> On Monday, March 22, 2004, at 07:36  PM, Will Robertson wrote:
>> Without knowing anything about your work over the last few months, 
>> this sounds incredible. Imagine TeX going from 
>> all-but-impossible-to-write-good-Zapfino to 
>> so-much-better-that-MacOSX-itself. Fantastic work!
> 
> Thanks, it's been a _lot_ of work (work which arguably I should've 
> managed for TUG2001, but hind sight is 20-20 and all that).
> 
> However, it's just more convenient / easier than Mac OS X itself --- one 
> _can_ get at all of Zapfino in Mac OS X (>= Jaguar) by installing the 
> Unicode glyph palette, scrolling through it for alternates and 
> double-clicking madly to place them all. (Now if I'd managed to work 
> this up before Jaguar came out....)

I'm not sure if you make sense---are you saying it's easier in Mac OS X, 
or easier "than"? Madly clicking through the character palette (with 
glyphs overlapping sometimes) is not my idea of easy!

> 
> * snip stuff over my head. I'll ask questions later
> 
> ...
> \usepackage{omegazapfino}
> ...
> \ZapfinoText{This would be typeset in Zapfino w/ contextual ligatures.}
> \ZapfinoRebus{This would have ornaments / pictures for words like 
> (-(duck)-) and (-(pen)-)}

If you're going to be calling \ZapfinoRebus anyway, why not 
automatically replace "duck" and "pen" with their pictures. Let the 
writer escape words that are required as text! What do you think?

> 
> For swashes I was thinking something along the lines of:
> ----a (that'd be the first level)
> +----a (second)
> ++----a (third)
> +++----a (fourth)
> 
> \----a (a swash from the upward direction)
> /----a (a swash from the downward)
> 
> and reversing everything for forms appropriate to the ends of words --- 
> does that sound okay?

I'm not 100% sure I follow. If I was writing "america" and I wanted 
swashes on both "a"s (ignore the plausability for now), I'd write 
----america---- with appropriate +,\,/ at the very begining and end of 
the word and hyphens like +----america----/?

Four hyphens seems excessive. Aren't there some unused ascii symbols 
that might be more space efficient? ~ ^ * come to possible mind.

> 
> That way I could run checks (moving the em and en dashes to the end of 
> the OTP) to remove them when they were added for letterforms w/ lacked 
> such.
> 
> That leaves the matter of alternates in the middle of words... perhaps 
> the paren-hyphen-paren option would work for that?
> 
> Hmm, co(-(g)-)ent --- is that too ugly?
> 
> co(--(g)--)ent
> 
> co(---(g)---)ent
> 
> That's not so bad, is it?
> 
> Then again, Zapfino has up to _eight_ styles for some letters.... so 
> counting all those hyphens might get kind of tedious.

How about a method which doesn't break up the word? (This is a very 
rushed thought, so the usual disclaimers apply)

If you are allowed commands, you could have like

\swash[g,4]{cogent}

to apply the fourth g swash to all the g's in "cogent".

\swash[g,2,g,4]{engage} would make the first g have the second swash, 
and the second (and subsequents) have the fourth.

Note that I have only just read about your Zapfino work, so I might be 
violating the philosophy or something involved, not to mention I have 
hardly thought the idea through. I'm just making it up as I go.

But I like not having to break the word. This method would also work 
whereever the letter is in the word, so you get the same command in all 
cases.

You could even leave out the arguments and randomly swash everything 
(\swash{cogent}). It'd be nice to be able to define swashes in words in 
the preamble just like custom hyphenations, too.

Like I said, I don't know much about this project. If I'm making foolish 
suggestions, please forgive me!

Other Will
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