Fontinst challenge...

[Lars Hellström]

At 00.06 +0200 0-06-28, Han The Thanh wrote:
>> >and the map entries are:
>> >
>> >putr8ax "1.5 ExtendFont" <putr8a.pfb <8a.enc
>> >putr8a <putr8a.pfb <8a.enc
>> >
>> The <8a.enc words here worries me, since unless something is really wrong
>> the encodings should appear first, and the 8a encoding shouldn't have an
>> encoding file to be downloaded at all because (i) it's the font's default
>> encoding and (ii) because it is predeclared in every postscript interpreter
>> (it's the StandardEncoding). Did you by any chance give a \specifypsfont
>> command? It shouldn't be necessary in this case, since you can get the
>> suffix .pfb simply through the command
>>
>>   \resetstr{PSfontsuffix}{.pfb}
>
>I just created the entries by hand and didn't know that the encoding must
>be specified first.

To my knowledge it doesn't (and you know much more about the inner workings
of drivers than I do), but that's where fontinst's \make_dvips would have
put them. I was more thinking about what mysterious settings could have
made fontinst produce this, but as it never did it seems I can stop
woorying about that.

>I use it with pdftex and didn't test with dvips yet.
>
>The encoding 8a.enc could be omited. The reason why I have it here is a
>workaround for a bug of earlier versions of Acrobat Reader on unix, where
>fonts with AdobeStandardEncoding are treated like AdobeMacEncoding.

Quite a bizarre bug.

>> Well, it's not as if the bbox is totally ignored---the standard height and
>> depth of raw glyphs are almost always the top and bottom of the bbox. I
>> suspect that the reason \topaccent uses the xheight for vertical
>> positioning is that it is modelled after the \accent primitive.
>
>as I mentioned in the previous mail, I would prefer manual to automatic
>placement of accents. The requirement is different for different
>languages. For example, aacute in czech has the acute moved slightly to
>the right side instead of centered.

Do you mean more to the right than in other languages, or more to the right
than if the bbox is centered over the base glyph? In the latter case I
wouldn't worry. The fonts I have looked at have put the acute (and grave)
accent in such a way that the center of the TeX box (half the advance
width) works fine as a horizontal reference point, whereas the center of
the bbox would put it too far to the left (and right respectively).

Lars Hellström