Behaviour of \latinfamily

[Rebecca and Rowland]

>Rebecca and Rowland writes:
> > I'm still (on and off) trying to produce some fontinst documentation, and
>good
>
> > I've run up against a problem: I can't, from examining fontinst's
> > behaviour, work out exactly what it does when it comes across a
> > \latinfamily command.
>you need to read the code.........

Ha ha very funny.  Done that.  Makes no sense to me at all.  If it did make
any sense to me, I wouldn't be asking, would I?

> > INFO>to make LaTeX (family,weight,shape,width) pck,m,n,: seek pckm8r
> > (pckm8a.afm)
> >
> > In the last case, it's clear that it's not found pckm8r.
>no, but it knows that to make 8r, it goes via 8a

Goes via 8a what exactly?  afm, mtx, pl?  And what other files does it look
for?

> > 2) Exactly which transformations fontinst does when it's found a particular
> > file.  For example, when it said it was looking for pckm8r, it found
>
>it follows a set of \if ...\else ..\fi statements in the macro \fake_shape_

Very good.  I've looked at that macro and I can't work out what it does.  I
can understand virtually none of the fontinst source code.  Can you explain?

> > 3) And I'm also puzzled at the way it produces fd files.  Can anyone
> > provide a definitive explanation of how it decides what to put in an fd
>i expect Alan could if you woke him up ....

Righto.

> > file, and how to tell fontinst to add a particular fount and fount
> > substiution to an fd file.
>fontinst.sty says:
>
>\substitutenoisy{ui}{it}
>\substitutesilent{bx}{b}
>\substitutesilent{b}{bx}
>\substitutesilent{b}{sb}
>\substitutesilent{b}{db}
>\substitutesilent{m}{mb}        % UV added 1998/04/30
>\substitutesilent{m}{l}
>\substitutesilent{sl}{it}
>\substitutesilent{it}{sl}
>
>
>which seems clear enough to me.

It's clear as mud to me.  What gets substituted for what under what
circumstances and how do you change this behaviour?  I've no idea, and I've
read the source code and played around with fontinst files and I'm none the
wiser.

And I'm no closer to finding out how to add a particular fount to an fd file.

> if it cant satisfy the real thing, the
>substitution is added

Under what circumstances exactly?  I've never seen it do the {ui}{it}
substitution.

I tried to force fontinst to do that substitution like this:

%&Plain
\input fontinst.sty

\installfonts
%
\installfamily{OT1}{cmrod}{\hyphenchar\font45 }
       \installfont {cmrod10} {cmr10, cmmi10} {OT19}
                    {OT1} {cmrod}{m}{n} {<10> <10.95>}
[snip more lines like this]

\substitutenoisy{ui}{it}

\endinstallfonts

and I ended up with fd files that did not have the {ui}{it} substitution.
Can you explain why?

Rowland.