fontinst v1.914 announcement

[Lars Hellström]

fontinst v1.914 is now available on CTAN in the fontinst-prerelease directory.

[[I'm not sure at present whether the trig package is going to continue
being duplicated with fontinst or not---there was some objection towards
this when I uploaded the files---so either will that get added a bit later
or will the manifest and fontinst.ins get changed in a few days. But those
are periferial matters.]]

What has changed since last, then? Mainly the following:

- The implementation of font metrics transformations has been rewritten and
fontinst now handles uniform scaling internally; the driver only needs to
do x-scaling and slanting.

- There is now a mechanism for generating the necessary map files entries
automatically (I posted an example of what it can produce a few months
back). So far it knows how to generate map files for the dvips and dvipdfm
drivers, and it can be extended to support other drivers.

- VPL files written by fontinst can now be used as base files for other
virtual fonts.

- There is a new command for generating the Postscript encoding (.enc) file
that corresponds to an ETX file.

- There is a new command \installfontas which adds an entry for an already
existing font to an FD.

- The \set..., \reset..., and \unset... commands now work as one would
expect when they occur between \installfonts and \endinstallfonts, i.e.,
their effects are not lost at the next \installfont or \installrawfont.

- Items in the file-list (#2) argument of \installfont and \installrawfont
can now contain explicit metrics commands (handy if it's a bit too short to
bother putting in a MTX file). An item that begins with the command
\metrics is interpreted as explicit metric commands rather than as a
filename.


No ETX or MTX files have been updated (yet) though, but there certainly is
a need for doing that. I believe it is more important that the map file
writer has been made publicly available.

Lars Hellström