[Fontinst] ugly Polish diacritics

[LarsHellström]

At 16.18 +0100 2003-02-24, Walter Schmidt wrote:
>Hi!
>
>The Polish characters aogonek, eogonek, Aogonek, Eogonek and
>zdot are often ugly, sometimes even unusable, when faked by
>fontinst:
>
>(1)
>The dot of the zdot should match the dot of the i.
>Of course, fontinst cannot do anything about the size of the
>dot accent, but we can -- at least -- build zdot in a way so
>that the height of the dot matches the height of the i.  See
>the macro \idotaccent in the attached pl-fix.mtx

Yes, it is a problem that accents are not put at suitable positions. (The
babel fixes to \" for OT1 is a classic.) Fine tuned positioning of the
accents should probably involve adjusting the vertical position as well as
the horizontal. (I suppose this is more noticable for the accented capitals
than for the lower case.) Using the height of i as a comparison is somewhat
risky though, as it will fail for smallcaps. Perhaps the height of
odieresis is better?

>
>(2)
>With Eogonek and Aogonek, the ogonek often protrudes over
>the right edge of the letter.  This can be avoided by
>building the glyphs in a way so that the the right edge of
>the ogonek is aligned with the right edge of the letter.

This is BTW the default LaTeX definition of \k.

>See the macro \capitalogonekaccent in the attached file
>pl-fix.mtx.  This solution does, however, not ensure that
>the resulting character looks really good; it just saves us
>from one particular problem.  Furthermore, it does not work
>with monospaced fonts, where the bare ogonek acent has the
>same width as all other characters.

Special cases for monospaced fonts are common in fontinst.
\ifisint{monowidth}\then ... \Else ... \Fi constructions are often
necessary.

>(3)
>Horizontal placement of the ogonek in the glyphs agonek and
>eogonek is not always good.  I have no idea how to get it
>automatically right.  I think one cannot do without manual
>interaction.  For instance, my VFs for the DayRoman font
>were created with fixes such as
>
>  \resetglyph{aogonek}
>     \botaccent{a}{ogonek}{412}% originally {850}

I thought the ogonek was supposed to hang from the stem/serif of a rather
than from the bowl?

>  \endsetglyph
>
>
>(4)
>I know at least one case (Adobe Palatino), where also the
>vertical placement of the ogonek is wrong.  Try the
>following:
>
>  {\fontfamily{ppl}\selectfont \k{a}, \k{e}, \k{A}, \k{E}}
>
>and use Adobe Palatino rather than URW Palladio for viewing
>or printing  (If you do not have the Adobe fonts, take a look
>at <http://home.vr-web.de/was/x/ppl-bug.pdf>).  Note that the
>VFs in the PSNFSS diszrib were actually built using Adobe's
>AFM files, not URW's!  I have no idea what can be done in a
>case like this :-(

Try checking for negative height of the ogonek, and if so moving it up to
the baseline:

  \moveup{\max{\neg{\height{ogonek}}}{0}}

This should be right, since the height of glyphs in AFM files is taken from
the bounding box.

Lars Hellström