fontinst v1.910 announcement

[Lars Hellström]

fontinst v1.910 is now available on CTAN (it hasn't appeared on all the
mirrors yet when I'm writing this, but is soon should) in the
fontinst-prerelease directory.

The noticable changes since v1.902 are:

Documentation that has been added: Ulrik's slides from his talk on fontinst
at EuroTeX are now in the doc/talks directory. Section 3 of the source has
new parts on reglyphing fonts, automatic map file generation (see below),
and monowidth and typewriter fonts.

A couple of bugs have been fixed, as for example the "ligature for missing
glyph" bug (bug in main fontinst) and the "no macron accent in sc fonts"
bug (bug in latin.mtx) that were reported to the list a while back. (Good
spotting, Peter, and Werner and Walter respectively!)

The fontdoc package has been improved in many respects, but the most
important is that it can now show both the then and the else parts of an if
(it used to only show the former). Typeset ot1.etx to see how it looks.
(NB: It does require some changes in markup, so you can't see the branches
in for example t1.etx.)

Several encoding files have been updated for v1.9, most notably the ot1
bunch, 8r.etx, and 8y.etx. (We still have to do the t1 bunch and all the
math encodings.)

There is a new transformed font command \fromany that is like \frommtx,
\frompl, and \fromafm but looks for a source font in any format (search
order as usual).

\installfont now accepts font metrics in VPL format as bases for new
virtual fonts. (OTOH, the transformed font commands \fromvpl and
\fromvplgivenetx has been removed since virtual fonts cannot be transformed
AFAIK.)

Composite (CC) glyphs now get assigned reasonable (I think) metrics if the
AFM file didn't specify any.

There are three new commands \noleftkerning, \norightkerning, and
\noleftrightkerning for removing all kerns from one or both sides of a
glyph.

.rc files are read with precisely the same catcodes as in the fontinst source.

And last but certainly not least:
---------------------------------
finstmsc.sty now contains an automatic map file writer. (v1.902 had som
sketches for this in fimapgen.dtx.) So far it does two things: It finds out
which fonts (that have been used by fontinst during a particular run) the
DVI driver needs to know about, and it collects all available information
in an easily readable text file. An entry in this file might for example be

Driver data for font padro8r:
   Source font TeX name: padr8a
   Font transforms applied:
      Font reencoded using 8r.etx.
      Font transformed by ((1.000 0.167) (0.000 1.000)).
   \PS_font_name: AGaramond-Regular

It shouldn't be too hard to edit this into a proper map file entry, and we
think having the above information collected like this is helpful
(especially if you are writing map file entries for fonts you've never used
before). Of course, the goal is to have it write proper map file entries
directly, so that one could get a line

padro8r AGaramond-Regular " 0.167 SlantFont TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont "
<8r.enc <padr8a.pfa

instead.


For the maintenance team,
Lars Hellström