texinfo/contrib/texifont/README

$Id$
texinfo/contrib/texifont/README

Everything in this directory is public domain.

The main source file is fsel.tex, tested by ftest.tex, documentation
(such as it is) in texifont.txi.

The story here is that Oleg Katsitadze and I (Karl Berry) collaborated
in the mid-2000s on a new font system for Texinfo (and that could work
with Eplain).  Oleg wrote essentially all the code, while I advised on
the design, etc.

The idea was to support all the widely-available free font families and
widely used input encodings.  getting away from of the current
hardwiring of Computer Modern in texinfo.tex.  The example at the end of
documentation gives the basic flavor.  As it stands, it is not hooked
into texinfo.tex or Texinfo documents at all.  That is not the hard part :).

Unfortunately, it never came to fruition.  Even more unfortunately, Oleg
and I can't even give any real specifics of what the "next thing" to do
is, we've lost the details in the haze of time.  As I recall, the
current problem was something about caching of glyphs to avoid
unnecessary (and greatly excessive) switching of fonts.  In addition,
"attributes" (fattr.tex) were starting to come into play.  But it all
remains a work in progress.

Anyway, I'm not sanguine about anyone ever doing anything with this, but
just in case some super-duper TeX hacker has too much time on their
hands :) and wants to pick it up, here it is.  Contact
bug-texinfo@gnu.org ...