questions & comments

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Allin Cottrell wrote:
> I installed my first postscript fonts for TeX by hand, "rolling
> my own"  vpl files to incorporate glyphs from the expert sets
> alongside those from the regular fonts.  This was quite

The advantage of fontinst is the flexibility to use font-specific
encodings, ligatures &c to incorporate individual font-dependent
features (like e.g. ct, st ligatures). It is simply very time consuming
to do manual calculations to find the right dimensions for combining
unavailable accented characters. 

> new user.  So eventually I go back into "contrib", into
> "rowland", and try taking a look at fontinst.dvi.  I have xdvi
> hooked up to my web browser, but xdvi just emits a seemingly
> endless stream of error messages.  Ah, this dvi file seems to
> use the ec fonts, which I don't have.  I'd be better off

Indeed it is very handy to have dvi-files which use only CM fonts for
better portability, the more in most cases the character set is
completely covered by these. The advantage is that one can make scalable
versions (PS, PDF)...

> fontinst.{tex,dvi} in contrib/rowland (_not_ to be confused with
> the completely different fontinst.dvi that results from latexing
> fontinst.dtx!) contain the user-level information that I wanted.

It would be very handy when the fontinst doc would be available without
Latexing as it is a plain Tex-tool...

> "\latinfamily{mbbj}{}" (Monotype Bembo).  Mostly I was
> impressed, of course, but in one respect puzzled: in view of the
> "j", why does the caps-and-small-caps virtual font, mbbrc9o, not
> take the oldstyle numerals from the expert set?  It takes the

There are two approaches: either use lining and oldstyle figures
respectively thoughout all fonts or provide lining figures in basic font
and oldstyle figures with a small caps font (into which they however do
not fit from the typographic view). The first scheme is consistent and
the second a technical compromize to ease access to OSF with fewer fonts
installed.

> %% Use superior numerals for footnote markers
> 
>  \def\@makefnmark{%
>  \fontfamily{mbbj}\fontseries{sup}\selectfont\@thefnmark\normalfont}

Explicit programming of font families into basic control structures
prevent documents of being portable. The deficit is that Latex has no
hooks for that...

> characters, available in the expert font, into the corresponding
> position in OT1, e.g. zerosuperior goes into slot 0x30.  Anyone
> else have a use for this?

Well, we use automatic setting of fractions (like 1/3) as diagonal
fractions via ligatures with superiors and inferiors from expert sets
and for all other fonts restricted to the available superiours (1, 2 and
3). This allows every combination (e.g. 3/2, 1/1000) completely
transparent set as diagonal fraction - there is no change in the
manuscript and it remains portable.

Hilmar Schlegel

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