Behaviour of \latinfamily

[Thierry Bouche]

Concernant « Re: Behaviour of \latinfamily », Rebecca and Rowland écrit : «
» Any idea what this ETXFILE.etx is?

an encoding file described in fontinst's obscure slang.

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

when saying tfm, i meant of course PL, installfont makes a VPL whereas
installrawfont makes a PL.

» 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.

I meant _in your simple case !_ \latinfamily has nothing to do with
psyr. oblique (resp. small caps) fonts are faked by
\transformont{\slantfont (resp. simply using another encoding file
T1c.etx say, that declares that Asmall is A scaled down), other
fakeries, as Scaron or the FFsmall lig (!!!!) are made by latin.mtx. 
Your psyr makes me think that you're talking of mathptm, in which case
you simply don't usde \latinfamily, but lower level macros like
\installfont, where you only have to give various metrics (mtx) that
can declare characters, kerning, ligatures, and fake almost anything;
an encodings (etx) that tell fontinst where to place things. The other
things are only latex interface rubbish.

» 
» 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'.

well, writing an FD file is in some sense registering that new font
set in latex nfss. producing PL/VPL files is making this font set
available to tex (after pltotf, vptovf...). It's the non-trivial part
of the installation, all the rest may be done by perl, shell scripts,
hand -- whatever. As i don't speak english very well, i can't garantee
what i write here at that level of linguistic accuracy.
» 
» 
» 
» 
Th. B.
« et, quoique l'on pourrait mettre un point d'exclamation à la fin de
chaque phrase, ce n'est peut-être pas une raison pour s'en dispenser ! »
                                     Comte de Lautréamont, 1869.