Faking small caps with heavier weights

Lars Hellström Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se
Thu, 22 Aug 2002 19:34:00 +0200


At 20.27 +0200 2002-08-21, Christian Swinehart wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I'm a fontinst amateur and while I've had moderate
>success using fontinst to install Adobe's Bembo
>typefaces, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to make
>the faked small caps look decent. In particular I was
>wondering if it would be possible to use the caps from
>the next heavier weight (e.g., make a Semibold font
>whose small caps characters are scaled caps from the
>Bold font, etc.).
>
>So far I've been using the line:
>\installfont{pbbsrc8o}{pbbs8x,pbbsj8r,dotlessj,latinx}{T1c}{T1}{pbb9}{sb}{sc}
>but I'm not exactly sure where to go from here...

The main obstacle is that pbbb8r (the capitals of which you would want to
use for faking the semibold smallcaps) uses the same names for glyphs as
pbbs8r does. The cleanest solution (while still faking the smallcaps) would
probably be to use \reglyphfont to create an MTX which declares the
capitals of pbbb8r under some other name (such as `A-bolder' instead of
`A', `B-bolder' instead of `B', etc.) and then for the \installfont provide
you own definitions of \cscglyph, \csctopaccent, \cscbotaccent, and
\cscaccent (normally defined in latin.mtx, but if you have previously
provided your own definitions then those will be used instead) so that they
instead of shrinking glyph #1 shrink glyph #1-bolder. You'll probably also
want to specify a different value for the smallcapsscale integer.

Lars Hellström