Fontinst modifications

[Ulrik Vieth]

>> This is the second time I've met references to fontinst v1.5; Alan
>> very kindly emailled me the documentation for it.  But am I
>> puzzled: where is it?  The most recent official version of fontinst
>> I can find on CTAN is 1.335.  Is v1.504 an official version, and if
>> so, where is it kept?  Or is it being kept hidden for some
>> particular reason?

> I believe it is available in the fontinst directory at
> ftp.cogs.susx.ac.uk, but it was a while since I looked there so I'm
> not sure (neither am I quite sure the computer name is completely
> accurate, but there should be a link to it somewhere on or below
> Alan's homepage). As far as I understand it, v1.504 is an alpha
> release (and has been so for some two years now), which is why it
> was never uploaded to CTAN. (Exception: There used to be a v1.504
> fontinst in the CTAN:fonts/psfonts/ hierarchy, but that seems to
> have been replaced by the unofficial v1.7.) That seems to be why the
> fontinst in the logical location in CTAN is still v1.335.

Question: Is the unofficial v1.6/v1.7 a direct successor of v1.504
or does the latter contain something that's missing from the current
release?  If not, I'd suggest to forget about that intermediate
version and concentrate our efforts on the latest release instead.  
As far as I understand,the primary reason why v.1.6/v1.7 is called
"unofficial" is because it is no longer maintained by Alan himself,
but by Sebastian instead.  Otherwise, I don't see why we shouldn't
accept it as the "semi-offical" current version.

As for future developments, I'm not opposed to adding new functions
if these are generally perceived as useful.  In partcular, your
reglyph.sty and rekern.sty packages stuff looks very interesting.

In the course of developping new math font encodings, we have so
far used a hacked version of the old fontinst 1.335, but I would
also be interested to see the non-application-specific functions
integrated into the standard fontinst, so that we can eventaully 
switch to fontinst v.1.7++.

I should add that I am currently working on converting fontinst.sty
and the related files such as fontdoc.sty and textcomp.tex into a
single .dtx source, which I hope to release pretty soon.

I hope this will help to 
* allow better documenting and indexing the source code,
* keeping related files and functions in sync,
* selectively integrating or leaving out additional hacks
  using docstrip preprocessor switches,
* integrating fontinst add-on packages.

Hope, you'll like it when you see it.

Cheers, Ulrik.