Behaviour of \latinfamily

[Ulrik Vieth]

> `It [the \latinfamily command] is designed to work with sets of afm
> files named according to the Fontname scheme, and is supplied with
> the foundry and font family name only.'

> Vital missing information: the afm files must be named ending in 8a
> (*You* think this is obvious.  It's not; how am I to guess that afm
> files for founts on my Mac aren't in Mac encoding?)

How are we to guess that your Mac fonts are using a different encoding?
It's a matter of perspecitve, I guess.

> `With this information it attempts to execute a[n] \installfont
> command for every combination of of weight and series for which it
> can find an appropriate afm file;'

> Vital missing information: *which* combinations precisely?  It certainly
> doesn't look for *all* combinations.  Which founts will it fake?

It tries all the weights in \latin_weights, all the shapes in \latin_shapes,
and all the widths in \latin_widths.  (Well, not really.  There's a switch
that determines whether fontinst attempts to fake narrow fonts, or whether
it only uses those narrow fonts, which are provided as real fonts.)

As for the weights, it does nothing, if no corresponding AFM files exists,
but it tries to add substitutions in order to fill the normal and bold
series as good as possible.  As for the shapes, it should be using real
fonts whenever they exist, but it will try to fake oblique and small caps.

(BTW, the present CTAN version was missing some weights, which were
simply ignored.  In addition there were some weight mapping which lead
to problems, such as regular (or book) and medium being mapped to the
same LaTeX weight.  I don't know when Sebastian will put up the new
version, in which these problems have been fixed.)

> `Expert sets, if available, can also be used where possible (for
> small caps, extra ligatures, etc.) by appending an `x' to the family
> name; if a `9' is appended to the name, then a set of fonts using
> old-style digits is built'.

> Vital missing information: how do you persuade it to *use* small
> caps glyphs (etc) from supplied afm files, and which family name are
> you talking about?

It should be using real small caps fonts, when they exists and when
they are installed with the proper names, so that it can find them.

> Now then, the one paragraph that I found useful was this:

> `\installfont{ptmr8t}{ptmr8r,latin}{T1}{T1}{ptm}{m}{n}{}

> This takes the list of \emph{available} metrics from the
> \texttt{ptmr8r.mtx} file, looks at the \texttt{latin.mtx}
> description of how to build characters, and creates entries in the
> output for all characters listed in the \texttt{t1.etx} encoding
> file (the encoding name is given in upper-case, but a filename in
> lower-case is searched for).  The same font is used for all sizes.'

> What would be even more useful would be to point out that \installfont
> creates a file ptmr8t.vpl and an entry in the fd file for ptm/m/n that
> points to this fount.  But I could work that out myself.

Right.

Cheers, Ulrik.