questions & comments

[Allin Cottrell]

On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Ulrik Vieth wrote:

> Your suggestion of puttting fontinst.{tex,dvi} from contrib/rowland
> into doc/fontinst_guide.{tex,dvi} (and also adding a .ps file) is 
> certainly a good idea.  You just have to find a meaningful filename 
> which doesn't exceed 8 characters. 

Yes, a .ps file would be nice, to get around the T1/OT1 issue.
Is CTAN bound by DOS 8.3 still?

> > Second comment:  I was a bit puzzled with one aspect of the
> > action of fontinst when I fed it mbbr8a.afm, mbbri8a.afm,
> > mbbr8x.afm and mbbri8x.afm, and asked it to do
> > "\latinfamily{mbbj}{}" (Monotype Bembo)...

> It depends on whether Montoype Bembo includes a real
> small-caps font as a raw font...  If you don't have a raw
> small-caps font mbbrc8a, the virtual small-caps fonts are
> faked... 

That doesn't quite square with what I saw.  I don't have an
mbbrc8a, but mbbr8x includes both "real" small caps and oldstyle
digits.  In the auto-generation of mbbrc9o the real small caps
were located and used OK (not faked), but the oldstyle digits
were not. But I think you have answered this in another posting. 

> > (Also, I wonder,
> > why the rigmarole with the "F-ligatures" in the csc font?)
> 
> Not sure what you mean.  If the encoding has slots for F-ligatures
> they have to be filled as good as possible...

My point is this: in the csc font there is "really" no such
thing as an F-ligature.  The fontinst-generated virtual font (a) 
puts in ligature instructions of the form F + I -> FI, but then
(b) "undoes" this move by putting into the "FI" slot
instructions to set an "F", then set an "I".  This is redundant
(you get the same result by removing the relevant LIG lines from
the vpl file), but actually a little worse than redundant since
I think I'm seeing incorrect spacing when, e.g. the word
"fiddle" is set in small caps: the "I" looks too close to the
"F".  The spacing looked better when I cut the LIG lines out of
the vpl and remade the vf and tfm. 

Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC