Re: Round-off errors in metrics & fontinst/finst status...

[Yannis Haralambous <yannis@pobox.com>]

>structures. Perl 5 seems like the right choice, and it's more-or-less
>as cross-platform as TeX. Maybe I can use Yannis Haralambous's code as
>a starting point..?
>
>I'm still debating whether I really want to do this; I'm not sure that
>I'd want to replace all of fontinst -- it's a pretty clever beast --
>but I might just write something that does everything I need of it

The idea of my utility is first of all to (intelligently) merge several
small font tables (8-bits) into a big one (16-bit). I find it crazy how
people are spending hours of valuable time for inventing new encodings
discussing on which character to fit into which encoding, how to use
the remaining one or two empty slots... In a 16-bit table you have room
for any typographical peculiarity (Frenchs and Germans disagree on the
height of the umlaut/trema, I have separate slots for these glyphs so
that both are happy), any special, mystic, hidden symbol you want.

I haven't worked on small caps yet, mainly because this concerns only
LGC scripts and I first want to get a working version of a more general
set of scripts. But you can easily expand the code: it is simple Perl.

Yannis

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