[Fontinst] ugly Polish diacritics

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Walter Schmidt wrote:
> The Polish characters aogonek, eogonek, Aogonek, Eogonek and
> zdot are often ugly, sometimes even unusable, when faked by
> fontinst:

My quick shot here: indeed sometimes character shapes are artistic
enough to prevent any algorithmic solution;-)
In any case one should keep in mind that geometric constructions remain
fakes in the general case.
However, it is very plausible to provide very reasonable constructions
which might even work better than those "supplemental" characters which
were either not considered by a font designer or put together by some
lousy font editor.

Since the tail of a, the bottom of e, the right stem of A, the right
edge of E and the tail of the "floating" ogonek have to be matched
precisely the only reliable solution is to supply composites information
in the AFM.
This doesn't usually affect or hurt any other software and requires only
a demo-version of a font editor.
Of course it has the backdraw of being pure manual & visual labour and
perhaps diametral to your intention - I think it is however the only
practical solution when the target are reliable and satisfactory
results...

Hilmar Schlegel

###

> (1)
> The dot of the zdot should match the dot of the i.
> (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.
> 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.

\ifisint{monowidth} ?

> (3)
> Horizontal placement of the ogonek in the glyphs agonek and
> (4)
> I know at least one case (Adobe Palatino), where also the
> vertical placement of the ogonek is wrong.  Try the

requires again font-specific interaction...

...
> case like this :-(
> 
> Greetings
> Walter
> 
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