[Fontinst] latest fixes for fontinst 1.914

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Walter Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:45:17 +0100, Lars Hellström wrote:
> 
> >Freaky! The dotaccent extends outside its bounding box!
> >Which foundry is responsible for this?
> 
> This is the original Adobe Palatino Roman 002.000 from
> FintFoolio8.  The bug does not occur when using URW's
...
> However, what are the consequences, as far as the use of
> the Palatino fonts is concerned?  Under the assumption that
> most TeX systems are using URW's fonts anyway, we can stay
> with version 001.005 of the AFMs.  In the long run however,

what means most???

> we'll have to give up the idea of "Base fonts", and PSNFSS
> needs to be fully oriented towards explicit use of the URW
> fonts.  But that's a different subject...

The key point is to use the correct metrics for the fonts. This is what
fontinst can help us a lot.
Another story are resident fonts: they have always been a problem and
one should avoid them for critical projects. Furthermore there is no
qualified version management which could deal with this type of
inconsistencies.
Therefore the conclusion is that one can save a little space by using
those charstrings which share identical metrics across font versions and
deal with that in fontinst by excluding the different ones but this
makes matters quite complex and can lead to errors.
I think it is even more relevant to use the appropriate kerning data for
the fonts. (than an error in zdotaccent)

BTW, the PDFs with BaseFontNames which are derived from the used
encoding effectively prevents use of resident fonts (which was actually
not the intention for consistent PDFs but is simply the practical
consequence of the strange naming practice)

Hope this helps,

Hilmar Schlegel

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