Re: Poor man's oldstyle figures

[Thierry Bouche <Thierry.Bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr>]

» why doesn't fontinst scale poor man's small caps automatically
» (by dividing xheight/capheight or \height{x} by \height{A} or
» something)

If you want to keep the stem weight you need to scale only vertically
(or scale 90 % horizontally, 65 % vertically, e.g.). But then you
enter the dark area of font freaking, and you'll realize soon that one
trick that works in one case won't on another design. For instance,
the letter o in Futura cannot be anything else than a perfect circle,
so faking an oblique version or a non homothetical small cap will
yield something unusable (as are some Bitstream's Futura weights,
btw...). So the choice (as any default choice) is between a bad
solution that is never very bad nor very well suited, and a specific
solution that works in one case, and could be tailored for few other
cases... 

Better not using faked glyphs anyway.


Thierry Bouche, Grenoble.