questions about psfonts.beta

[Jordan Backler <71172.524@compuserve.com>]

Hi:

> Peter Harmand writes:

> I have some questions about the psfonts.beta release:

>  1) I don't have the expert set for the Lucida Bright fonts. Can I fake
> a small caps font with afm2tfm's -V option (and a suitable encoding)
> for the 7t,8t,8r-world or do I have to learn fontinst? Is there a
> ready-made input file for fontinst for generating hlhrc??
> (So far I worked always only with Tom Rokicki's afm2tfm or with Y&Y's
> reencode and afmtotfm.)

>  2) Some of my fonts are older than the ones in psfonts.beta, e.g.
> my AGaramond-Regular has Creation Date Jul 12 1989 in the afm- and the
> pfb-file, the supplied afm-file has Jan 16 1992. Can I use my old
> pfb-file or should I build new *.tfm and *.vf for the old *.afm?

Compare the AFM file character advance widths (WX field).  Typically these
do not change when fonts are `updated', and the same TFM file can be used.  
Very early on (1987) some metrics did change when scalable outline fonts 
were revised,  amids howls from  users).

>  3) The readme in psfonts.beta says

>>kerning (no ``raw'' fonts); therefore, even the *8r base fonts can be
>>used for real typesetting.

>but some discussion in this list indicates that they shouldn't be used.
>I made some tests with ptmr8r and hlhr8r (*not* using 8r.sty) and gave up
>quickly when I noticed that --- doesn't produce emdash. Is this a bug
>or a feature? (I would very much appreciate supported tfm's with
>extra Postscript characters and complete kerning information; in the
>past I used my own encoding which I changed at least once a year.
>I hope that 8r can get me out of the morass.)

Since you have AFMtoTFM (as opposed to AFM2TFM) you can easily make
TFM files complete with kerning and ligatures for these fonts.  Even all the
usual pseudo-ligatures and convenient new pseudo-ligatures to link to the 
ready-made accented characters.  So you can use them easily that way ---
without any additional Mickey Mouse.  I cannot emphasize how nice this
is for the typical user who has no interest in the hairy technical detail, 
or directories full of files -- the significance of which is not always clear.

8r provides access to all 228 glyphs found in most scalable outline text fonts, 
plus some extra f-ligatures.  I personally prefer `texnansi' (:=) which we have 
been using for a long time and which has the additional feature that is has 
most everything where TeX expects and so it will work easily in plain TeX as 
well as LaTeX.  But we have had that particular discussion before :=), so I
will shut up...

Regards, Berthold K.P. Horn