🚀 go-pugleaf

On Friday, Aug. 28, 1992, I posted a query about a posting that appeared
on netnews. I referred to the following line in that posting:

>  > \font\opt12=optima at 12 pt

and I opined that the syntax was wrong and queried as to the nature of the
error.  I recieved two replies:

From "Raymond Chen" <rjc@math.Princeton.EDU>

 > Remember that <equals> can be the null string.  So this defines \opt to
 > refer to the font "12=optima".

I probably  should have included more of the original posting. The only error
message produced was a ``font not found loadable'' message saying optima.tfm
was unavailable. Because of this I assumed that TeX correctly read optima as
the font name and I did not check into the definition of <equals> (which is
<optional spaces> | <optional spaces>=_12 and is a non-intuitive way of saying
the more intuitive: <optional spaces><optional =_12>).  So Raymond seems to be
right, but it doesn't explain why the message did not refer to font
``12=optima''.

-------------------

From: Peter Galko <galko@trix.genie.uottawa.ca>

 > You are attempting to define a font name (like opt10) which is illegal
   ^^^
    | Actually the original poster was attempting this.

 > since font names have names which must conform to the rules for control
 > sequence names (see p. 277 in the TeXbook).  The Texbook explains on p. 7
 > that control sequences can only include letters (numbers are explicitly
 > ruled out), which really means characters currently set to have category
 > 11.

Again, I should have explained more. I was trying to understand the nature of
error message recieved, and jumped to the conclusion that \font would take
a control sequence with a delimiter (which is what happens after \def if a
non-category 11 character follows a control sequence being \def'ed).

I still don't understand the reason for the error messages reported in the
original post (which I neglected to keep).

Dan Luecking.