fontinst with 8y.etx

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Ulrik Vieth wrote:
> 
> Thierry wrote:
> 
> > BTW, if LY1 is functionnally equivalent to 8r, why 8r ?
> 
> Good question.  Personally, I find 8y (or LY1) slightly less arbitrary
> then 8r.  Both provide access to all the glyphs available in standard
> PostScript fonts, they just use a slightly different arrangement.

No, there is a an essential difference: LY claims to be Acrobat-Reader
proof when making PDF. If that works in any case, esp. on a Mac is not
perfectly sure but it circumvents the most obvious traps.
On the other side it is promoted with the argument to avoid the need of
VF - which is only important for Dvi-interpreters not capable of doing
VF and not relevant in the context of fontinst. 

> Since hardly anybody seems to be interested in typesetting directly
> with 8r, while OTOH Y&Y does promote typesetting with 8y (regardless
> whether or not you may find that adequate for non-expertized fonts),

Well, there is the difficulty that fontinst generated LY encoded TFMs
are quite different from those made by the Y&Y tools. This leads under
certain circumstances to a big processing overhead due to the fact that
fontinst is rounding metric data to a grid of 1 AFM unit while the Y&Y
tools do not round metric data. Also due to different checksums it is
not straight forward to mix "raw" fonts from Y&Y and VFs made by
fontinst.

> using fontinst to install 7t/8t/8c on top of 8y (and 8x, if available)
> might turn out a compromise that could make eveyone happy?  WDYT?

>From the Tex view it is completely irrelevant which
all-Standard-Roman-Character-Set encoding is used. For the purpose in
question it is however necessary or at least of desire to add a few
things to LY1 to make complete T1 fonts from fonts which provide some
additional characters. This applies especially to Eng and A, E-ogonek
which are usually not provided as composites. Postscript level 3 fonts
will provide them.
LY is not optimal in the sense that it contains several repeated codes
and therefore has less space for additional useful characters which some
fonts might provide - the advantage is mainly to cover the majority of
standard fonts without the need of a special installation.

If one keeps the little details in mind LY1+ works just fine.

Hilmar Schlegel

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