[Fontinst] The next fontinst release

[LarsHellström]

This has been a long time in coming, and it is not quite here yet, but in
view of Walter's recent production of fixes I thought it better that I made
available that which I have got. Hence if you look in
http://abel.math.umu.se/~lars/fontinst/ you will find two files
fontinst.tar.gz and xdoc.tar.gz. The former is the actual fontinst
hierarchy, whereas the latter contains two LaTeX packages which you will
need if you want to typeset fisource.tex (I did however include
fisource.dvi, so that is not an immediate need).

So then, what's new? I suppose these are the three main areas:

1. The \installfont command has gotten more expressive, in particular the
second (metrics) and third (ETX) arguments. Both are now basically
comma-separated lists of files (previously this was only true for the
metrics argument). Items in these lists can now be followed by "keyword
phrases", which generalize the old "scaled" mechanism. These things are
described in Subsection 3.7 of fisource.tex (except for the very new
"option" keyword, which is still only documented in fimain.dtx [*]).

[*] It is because of this kind of thing that I say the next fontinst
release isn't quite here yet.

2. I've pretty much given up on latin.mtx, so instead I've written a new,
more modular, metrics file newlatin.mtx that should replace it (in use; of
whether it should also do so in name I am not yet sure). I'd appreciate if
people will test this to see if I've forgotten some useful feature of
latin.mtx.  Trivial usage is just as for latin: smack it in after all the
font-specific metric files in the \installfont, and hope for the best.

3. The guts of the fontdoc LaTeX package has been restructured and it is
now more robust (in particular, it can now typeset underscores in names of
variables, such as maxdepth_neg). I believe the formatting of integer
expressions and conditional commands is much better now. (Try LaTeXing e.g.
latin.mtx and newlatin.mtx with the new fontdoc.) There are also a bunch of
new features for documenting encodings, which are described in
doc/encspecs/encspecs.tex.


Besides these major areas, a few small items that may be of interest:

* The \fontinstcc and \normalcc command, for switching to fontinst catcodes
or back.
* PL->MTX metrics conversions are now more precise (rounding instead of
truncating), and ETX files can declare the correspondence between
fontdimens and fontinst integers that is used in this conversion.
* A new case if <integer expression>: \half{<integer expression>}. It's
faster than \scaled{<integer expression>}{500} and rounds better.
* \ifareglyphs{glyph1,...,glyphN}\then -- test if glyph1 _and_ ... _and_
glyphN are all set.
* \aliased, \ifdirect -- supports ETX files that are slightly differently
interpretated in different contexts.

I think that is it. I suppose I could add the "coming attraction" of
commands for keeping track of bounding boxes, if there is popular demand,
but right now it is rather the files surrounding fontinst.sty that need to
be worked on.

Lars Hellström