Behaviour of \latinfamily

[Rebecca and Rowland]

>» I don't know exactly, at which point .fd files come into play.
>
>the last point, it's the \installfamily that records what should be
>output, and \endinstallfonts actually takes care of producing the fd's.

Righto (to an extent).  What makes \installfamily record anything?  That
is, what commands make fontinst store a line to be placed in the fd file?

>» In general, fontinst needs an .mtx file to start the reencoding
>» business, which is can generate itself from .afm or .pl files.
>
>yes, with \afmtomtx, \mtxtopl and so on...

Hmm...  A question: fontinst says this:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% CONVERTING AN AFM FILE TO AN MTX FILE %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%
% The macro:
%
%    \afmtomtx{AFMFILE}{MTXFILE}
%
% reads ETXFILE.etx and AFMFILE.afm, and writes the same information
% out to MTXFILE.mtx.

Any idea what this ETXFILE.etx is?

>» \installrawfont is trickier, but I suppose it is the interanl
>» function which is called by higher-level \installfont macros
>» and eventually produces an .fd file from a temporary .mtx file.
>
>i don't think so, it is rather a simplified version that produces
>ligfull TFMs rather than VFs (at an early  step in finst history, i
>believe that 8r base fonts were done with afm2tfm, then Constantin
>Kahn came with \installrawfonts...)

But this can't be right: fontinst doesn't create tfms at all.

>» > But I've never seen fontinst place any entries in a 8r.fd file, even
>» > though it's created 8r.fd files for me quite happily.
>»
>» This might be a problem indeed.  The default settings of \latin_encodings
>» tell fontinst to proudce OT1 and T1 only, so I don't know, why this is
>» generated in the first place.
>
>i never use \latinfamily ;-) (because i prefered to use my own shell
>scripts to build driver files rather than rely on latinfamily, but i
>think \latinfamily{pbv}{} is more or less equivalent to
>
>\installfonts
>       \installfamily{8r}{pbv}{}
>      \installfamily{OT1}{pbv}{}
>      \installfamily{T1}{pbv}{}
>
>\transformfont{pbvd8r}{\reencodefont{8r}{\fromafm{pbvd8a}}}
>      \installrawfont{pbvd8r}{pbvd8r,latin}{8r}{8r}{pbv}{db}{n}{}
>      \installfont{pbvd7t}{pbvd8r,psyr,latin}{OT1}{OT1}{pbv}{db}{n}{}
>      \installfont{pbvd8t}{pbvd8r,latin}{T1}{T1}{pbv}{db}{n}{}
[snip stuff]
>\endinstallfonts\bye

This doesn't tie up with my observations: I've never seen psyr specified
anywhere, and this doesn't seem to take into account the various fakeries
fontinst can do, or take into account any (say) founts with small caps that
might be present which Sebastian tells me will be used if they exist.

>so it should install  8r fonts & fd.

A question: when you say `install 8r fonts and fd', what exactly do you
mean?  From my observations of \latinfamily's behaviour, it creates a load
of pl and vpl files with a few fd files.  I'm told that it's supposed to
create fd files for OT1 and T1 encoding only; I've seen useless 8r fd files
created.

To my mind, installing a fount for use with LaTeX involves creating tfm and
vf files, moving them to a place on the TeX and dvi driver search paths
respectively, creating useful fd files, and adding lines to the dvi
driver's fount mapping file.  Of this, fontinst does one job only when you
execute a \latinfamily command: creating useful (sometimes) fd files for T1
and OT1 encoding, *not* 8r encoding.  So fontinst doesn't ever install
founts.  This is why I ask what you mean when you say `install ... fonts'.

>» > In particular, I've not seen fontinst substitute it for ui.
>»
>» I believe it does so or OT1 only because of \pounds vs. \dollar.
>
>you mean it _should_. i also tested that and did not get what i expected.

Oh good - so it's not just me :-)

>»   If there is no other doucmentation, you have
>» no choice but
>
>writing it! ;-)

I'm trying...  My head hurts at the moment.

Rowland.