having fontinst write font map file

[Ulrik Vieth]

Hi all,

here's an idea that was brought up by Thomas Esser during discussions
at the DANTE'99 meeting:

So far, fontinst itself only does part of the job of installing fonts,
i.e. writing out .pl and .vpl files (one for every \installfont or
\installrawfont command), as well as writing out .fd files for LaTeX
at the end of the job.  What is left to do to the user or the calling
Perl script is (a) converting .pl and .vpl to the corresponding binary
formats and (b) generating a .map file for dvips.  While task (a) is
relatively easy to explain to users, task (b) is a complicated matter
when it comes to dealing with all those "SlantFont" and "ReEncodeFont"
commands.  Now the real question is: why can't we have fontinst write
out the map file as well.  Since it is only a text file to be written,
there shouldn't be a problem to do it in principle except for some
slightly complicated macro hacking of storing the information in a
token list and processing it when fontinst gets to \endinstallfonts.

Comments, anyone?

Cheers, Ulrik.