Boundaries

[Lars Hellström]

At 13.46 +0200 0-04-25, Thierry Bouche wrote:
>Hi!
>
>I just realized that boundary chars handling changed with 1.9...
>
>If I want to do things as earlier, I'd like to have both left & right
>boundary chars set to 0 (= grave in T1).

Well, the easiest way to do things as before would be to use cfntinst.sty
instead of fontinst.sty, but that's mainly intended for running old code,
not for writing new.

>The problem seem to be : adding makerightboundary into the
>setslot/ends... for grave + setleftrightkerning{boundarychar}{space}
>will do it ok for the end of words.

Yes.

>But the left boundary needs a \set/\endset... that increases the slot
>number by one, and T1 is full! Why is there no makeleftboundary
>available?

No! The case here is that TeX3 recognises 257 entry points in the ligkern
table---256 entry points for the character slots (marked in a PL file by
(LABEL <slot>) properties) and one for the left boundary (marked in a PL
file by a (LABEL BOUNDARYCHAR) property; BOUNDARYCHAR here is not a
variable reference, but a keyword). \setleftboundary ...
\endsetleftboundary does not increase the slot number, but causes fontinst
to write a ligkern program preceeded by (LABEL BOUNDARYCHAR).

>Is there no way to set the left BDCHR without loosing a slot?

As I wrote above, there is. It's instead the right BDCHR that's messy, but
that's a limitation of the TFM format.

Lars Hellström