Re: fontinst 1.801 -- still worse

[Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>]

Berthold K.P. Horn writes:
 > Well, my idea is that AFM2TFM be revived to where you can use it
 > to make TFM files complete with ligatures and kerning pairs.
I dont have any quarrel with that

 > As you may have noticed, I have been lobbying for a lot of things
 > that should happen that do *not* involve buying anything.  For
 > example, having all TeX implementations read all three flavours
 > of line termination.  Don't need to buy Y&Y TeX for that :-)!

I think, genuinely, that Y&Y promotes a good model of interaction
between free and commercial software. you know about, support, and
understand the free stuff, but have your own stuff available, for
which you point out the advantages. usually, it works well

 > >  b) in our `free' world, dvips cannot grok TrueType fonts; thats
 > >probably a far bigger barrier to common use than the metrics
 > 
 > How is this relevant?  I thought we were talking about Type 1 fonts.
 > WriteTFM is not restricted to TrueType fonts -- it works for
yes, i was just thinking aloud that the lack of truetype support in 
free dvi drivers is a bigger problem than metrics.

 > Small changes to AFM2TFM would make it actually useable.
 > Namely making it able to do kerning and ligatures.
I dont have anything against that. the stuff is under the GPL, why
doesnt someone run with this and produce a variant?

 > Both.  It first has to create a suitable AFM file (with added comments)
 > and then call AFMtoTFM.  How it links to AFMtoTFM (DLL or EXE) is less 
 > significant.  To create a good AFM file it has to trace out all the glyph 
 > outlines, follow calls to construct composites from base characters etc. 
 > and do this for the different font formats.
blimey......

 > I disagree, I think we should (i) turn off meaningless complaints
 > from current versions of applications and (ii) use the radix 40 scheme
 > described elsewhere to hide the name of the encoding in the checksum
 > for advanced applications that can check this :-)

fine by me. luckily, aint my job since I dont maintain any relevant
software :-}

sebastian