Re: kern pairs in CM fonts TFM

[Yannis Haralambous <yannis@null.net>]

>Many thanks for this. I have just run into trouble with endashes in
>Gill Sans. (r hyphen) is kerned, and looks neat. TeX therefore gives
>(r endash) has the same kern, which makes the endash nearly collide
>with the r, as endash is further from the baseline than hyphen...
>
>Is there any way around this except a future e-TeX?

You can wait for a future e-TeX or take a today's omega: we are not
at all using internal font ligatures (only kernings). This allows us
to change the ligature scheme dynamically (Portuguese and Turkish
use no ff, ffi, ... other languages do). And it solves your problem:
omega will replace -- by the endash before it even arrives to the font
(in fact at the Unicode level, since endash is indeed a Unicode
character and not merely a glyph). Then you font can define kernings
between r and - but not with endash and bingo.

Could this be more natural than that??

Yannis