[Fontinst] letterspacing

[Oliver Heins]

I have to questions concerning letterspacing.

1. I want to space out the letters of a small font (the one I use for
footnotes) as it's adviced in many typographic books.  AFAIK this is not
possibly inside of TeX, and I have to produce a virtual font for this.

>From what I've read, it seems to be possibly to do so with fontinst by
setting the variable letterspace in the encoding (.etx) file.  I tried,
but it didn't work.

In the file 8r-olli.etx (which is a copy of 8r.etx) I added a line 
"\setint{letterspacing}{150}" just after the "\encoding".

,----
| [...]
| 
| \encoding
| 
| \needsfontinstversion{1.909}
| 
| \setint{letterspacing}{1pt}
| 
| [...]
`----

I use the 8r-olli.etx within the following script[1], here shortened to
do only the roman font (flir8a is a font containing just the
ff-ligatures):

,----
| \input fontinst.sty
| 
| \installfonts
| \installfamily{T1}{pegx}{}
| \installfamily{TS1}{pegx}{}
| \installfamily{OT1}{pegx}{}
|  
| \installfamily{T1}{pegj}{}
| \installfamily{TS1}{pegj}{}
| \installfamily{OT1}{pegj}{}
| 
| \transformfont{pegr8r}{\reencodefont{8r-olli}{\fromafm{pegr8a}}}
| \transformfont{flir8r}{\reencodefont{8r-olli}{\fromafm{flir8a}}}
| \installrawfont{pegr8r}{pegr8r,8r}{8r-olli}{8r-olli}{}{}{}{}
| \installrawfont{flir8r}{flir8r,8r}{8r-olli}{8r-olli}{}{}{}{}
| 
| % OsF digits
| 
| \installfont{pegr9d}{pegr8r,unsetnum,kernoff,flir8r,pegrc8r,kernon,latin}{t1}
|   {T1}{pegj}{m}{n}{}
| \installfont{pegr9c}{pegr8r,unsetnum,kernoff,flir8r,pegrc8r,kernon,textcomp}{ts1}
|   {TS1}{pegj}{m}{n}{}
| \installfont{pegr9o}{pegr8r,unsetnum,kernoff,flir8r,pegrc8r,kernon,latin}{ot1}
|   {OT1}{pegj}{m}{n}{}
| 
| \installfont{pegrc9d}{pegrc8r,latin}{T1}
|   {T1}{pegj}{m}{sc}{}
| \installfont{pegrc9o}{pegrc8r,latin}{ot1}
|   {OT1}{pegj}{m}{sc}{}
| 
| % normal digits
| 
| \installfont{pegr9e}{pegr8r,kernoff,flir8r,kernon,latin}{t1}
|   {T1}{pegx}{m}{n}{}
| \installfont{pegr9t}{pegr8r,kernoff,flir8r,kernon,latin}{ot1}
|   {OT1}{pegx}{m}{n}{}
| 
| \installfont{pegrc9e}{pegrc8r,unsetnum,kernoff,pegr8r,kernon,latin}{t1}
|   {T1}{pegx}{m}{sc}{}
| \installfont{pegrc9t}{pegrc8r,unsetnum,kernoff,pegr8r,kernon,latin}{ot1}
|   {OT1}{pegx}{m}{sc}{}
| 
| \installfontas{pegr9c}
|   {TS1}{pegx}{m}{n}{}
| 
| \endinstallfonts
| \bye
`----

The font is the same as I would use the original 8r.etx, the letter
spacing isn't wider.


2. How should I name such a font?  Karl Berry writes in his "Filenames
for fonts":

,----
| The letterspacing possibilities introduced by fontinst and virtual fonts
| have not yet become sufficiently widespread to make standardization
| beneficial. 
`----


TIA,
olli


Footnotes: 
[1]  Thanks to Walter Schmidt