having fontinst write font map file

[Rebecca and Rowland]

At 3:50 pm +0000 25/2/99, Ulrik Vieth wrote:
>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.

Not only 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.

Hmm...  It's not terribly *complicated* if you can work out what the name
of the fount is (I have difficulty with this sometimes), but it is slow and
tedious.

> 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?

It sounds like a good idea.  It would be even better if the process could
be modified to output other kinds of dvi driver mapping file too - I
personally would like a dvips map file *and* an OzTeX config file entry.
They are similar, but not identical, so the job's not impossible but not
trivial either.

Rowland.