possibly severe bug in fontinst 1.914

[Lars Hellström]

At 18.30 +0100 2001-03-06, Walter Schmidt wrote:
>Lars,
>
>thank you very mich for the explanations.  It works fine now!
>
>As to the wrong standalone use of the \fromafm command:
>When I started to learn fontinst, I tried to understand
>the "official" examples, for instance
>
>  CTAN:fonts/utilities/fontinst/examples/mathptm/fontptcm.tex
>
>which actually uses \fromafm directly!
>
>The script is easy to undertand, well documented, and the
>name of the \fromafm command expresses clearly what goes on.
>How can a beginer know that this is not correct?

Indeed, they probably cannot; the documentation can, as usual, be improved.
(There is unfortunately a lot of archaic code in the fontinst distribution.)

As that \fromafm serves no purpose anyway it should be removed. BTW, what I
think is just as silly in that example is that all the \transformfont's
appear between \installfonts and \endinstallfonts. They don't need to be
there (they could just as well appear before the \installfonts) and there
are so many peculiar things (in particular the metrics caching) going on
behind the scenes between \installfonts and \endinstallfonts anyway that it
is best to put as little there as possible.

>BTW:
>Can the standalone use of \fromafm (with v1.801, of course)
>break anything?

No, \fromafm is quite harmless, it's just that it isn't meant to be used by
itself like that (I might find a need to redefine it as something less
harmless, at some point in the future.)

Lars Hellström