Some comments to Re: Behaviour of ...

[Lars Hellström]

(Single > is Rowland, double > is me.)
>>The trouble of the many encodings seems familiar, but I suppose I managed
>>to avoid most of it simply by refraining from using \latinfamily;
>>personally I believe that is a too high level to use fontinst from,
>
>For many jobs, it's not appropriate; but then again, it's useful for some
>things.  If you've got a `normal' set of four afms for a `normal' text
>fount family, why not use \latinfamily?  The reason I'm concentrating on it
>is that you've got to start somewhere, the current documentation for
>\latinfamily is hopeless (it's just plain wrong in places and tells you
>virtually nothing of any real use), and I've been asked by some people who
>have used or attempted to use fontinst to improve the \latinfamily
>documentation in particular.

You've got a point. I suspect most of my opinions come from a rather
extreme typographical view (don't fake _anything_, always use proper
fonts), a mainstream user of fontinst is probably better off starting from
a high level. But I still believe that by starting at the \installfont
level, you get a much better idea about what is actually going on (you will
probably have to understand what the input and output files are for, but
there is still no need to understand how the actual conversion is done).

>> but on
>>the other hand I am probably one of those people who know fontinst too good
>>to be able to write a good documentation.
>
>I've an idea that the average Mac user is likely to be better at writing
>documentation than the average Unix user, mainly because Mac users tend to
>be more interested in `ease of use' and less inclined to assume that
>`everybody knows that'.

I thought everybody knew that. :-)

/Lars