Re: 8r fonts

[Piet Tutelaers <P.T.H.Tutelaers@urc.tue.nl>]

> 
>  > PERL would be a much better tool to handle all the PS
>  > font stuff. And it is not too late to rewrite fontinst into PERL.
> 
> Ho ho ho, very droll...  Yes, perl would have been a better language
> to start off with (in fact some of the postprocessing of fontinst
> fonts is done with perl) but I think it's too late to port fontinst.
> You could do it if you were prepared to change the syntax of .mtx and
> .etx files, but as it stands they are very TeX-specific, and writing a
> perl parser for them would be tantamount to writing a TeX-mouth
> interpreter in perl.
> 
> If I were doing it all again I'd do it differently, but these days I
> tend to have a `not (very) broken so don't fix it (much)' feeling
> about fontinst.
> 
> Alan.
> 

In order to get a feeling for the effort needed to rewrite fontinst into
PERL:
 (1) What exact role plays the .etx and .mtx files in the fontinst process?
 (2) Which parts can only be handled in TeX's mouth?

--Piet