Re: How can I check for the existence of a glyph in TeX?

[Lars Hellström <Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se>]

Alan Jeffrey wrote:
>On some systems (notably MacOs) whether a glyph exists or not depends on
>which driver you use (eg PostScript drivers have access to all glyphs,
>but QuickDraw drivers don't).  So the notion of `missing glyph' has to
>be put off to the driver in some cases.
>
AFSIK it's not really a matter of whether the drivers can access all glyphs
or not, but rather a matter of which glyphs are included in the fonts. Mac
fonts are (quite logically in most circumstances) usually set up to match
Apple's extension of 7-bit ASCII, not Adobe's, so some glyphs in the Adobe
set might not be included. You can always set up a Quickdraw font that
allows you to access any sufficiently small (up to 224 characters is no
problem) subset of glyphs from a Postscript font through Quickdraw alone.
(Doing it by hand though is about as making a TFM+VF from an AFM without
using VPtoVF or fontinst.)

/Lars