playing with Centaurs

[Fernando Q. Gouvea]

I'm trying to play with the Centaur fonts (with Expert fonts and
alternates) and thereby to teach myself the details of fontinst.

So, some (perhaps naive) questions:

1) Several times I've gotten errors because there is no "x" glyph in the
font. I think this happens when latin.mtx calls

\setint{xheight}{\height{x}}

There must be a workaround...

2) One of the Centaur fonts is a swash italic, most of whose characters
are called things like "Aswash"... but not all of them! It also includes
a "ct" ligature and other such things. I would like to set it up as a
separate font, so that I can then define a macro \swash{A} to call Aswash
or even \ctlig to use a ct ligature. How do I do this?

3) Centaur has four alternate fonts (roman, bold, italic, bolditalic) each
of which contain only a few characters. Perhaps the best way to use these
is to create alternate versions of the full fonts that use the same
characters everywhere except in those slots. But this too seems to require
an alternate encoding, to call "Qalternate" instead of "Q". (The
characters are inconsistently named: Qalternate, but Qsmallalt...)

Any help, or models of how to do this, will be very welcome!

Fernando

============================================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea
Dept. of Mathematics                            Editor, FOCUS and MAA Online
Colby College                                   http://www.maa.org
Waterville, ME 04901
fqgouvea@colby.edu

Misery no longer loves company.  Nowadays it insists on it.
  -- Russell Baker