Re: What's the relationship between vfs and tfms?

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

Concernant « Re: What's the relationship between vfs and tfms? », Berthold K.P. Horn écrit :

   « I was not taking about something so complex.  

   we were talking of the current fontinst, it _does_ fake T1 glyphs that
   miss in t1 fonts. If we have this possibility, i don't see why we
   should avoid it: then we'd need a CTAN area for `national' users, one
   for `not too foreign' ones--happy with adobe glyphs--, and another one

Oh, oh :-) you just pushed another one of my buttons.  T1 gives up
about 30 useful glyphs to add some more Eastern European Latin glyphs.
This adds to the complexity since now you need `text companion' fonts
to hold these displaced glyphs (i.e. 4 TFMs + 2 VF per font instead of
a single TFM!).  

What is worse, since T1 doesn't cover *all* of the ISO Latin
characters, it isn't as much use as one might hope.  For example, one
would have thought that the people in Poland in particularly would be
happy that the glyphs they use are included in T1.  Instead they seem
to prefer their own encoding that also includes the glyphs used by
their neighbors (such extra characters decorated with ogonek used in
Lathvia).  Ironic.

   for `exotic users' whose language _requires_ faked glyphs (not
   mentionning the remaining ones that are simply `unfakable' and bound to
   print pages of black boxes...).

If we go too far away from the basic ISO Latin glyphs (minus Greek and
Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic) then we are talking special fonts in any
case and T1 is not applicable.

In any case, its typographically cleaner to use fonts that already
have all the glyphs you need.  For example, Lucida Latin fonts have
everything to cover ISO Latin (and in NT you can actually access them
all at the same time - but not in TeX of course).

   « P.S. I am sorry this has taken us so far away from the documentation
   « for fontinst, but maybe it will clarify some font related issues
   « as a side effect.

   maybe _i_ should be sorry ;-)

:-)  Regards, Berthold.