The Universe of Discourse

Wed, 05 Apr 2006

TeX and the long S
It just occurs to me, reading today's article, that the final sentence is one of the strangest I've written in quite a while. It says:

stock TeX does not have any way to make a long medial s.

This is a strange thing to say because TeX was principally designed as a mathematical typesetting system, and one of the most common of all mathematical notations is the integral sign:

$$\int_a^b f'(x) dx = f(b) - f(a)$$

And the integral sign $$\int$$ is nothing more than an old-style long s; the 's' is for 'sum'.

Strange or not, the substance of my remark is correct, since standard TeX's fonts do not provide a long s in a size suitable for use in running text in place of a regular s.

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