[Fontinst] fontinst v1.924 usage

[LarsHellström]

At 19.55 +0100 2003-03-26, Walter Schmidt wrote:
>On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 18:17:38 +0100, Lars Hellström wrote:
>
>>>One resulting problem is that I am getting package submissions that
>>>rely on fontinst but that are not compatible with either version
>>>that we hold.
>
>I suggest to ask him, whether he actually means fontinst 1.924.
>Maybe he refers only to the updated 8r encoding or to my latest
>patches.  I can hardly believe that 1.924 is already widely used.

That would make more sense (and also be more constitent with what
fontinst-related stuff has actually been uploaded to CTAN). I'll have to
ask him again what he meant.

>>PS: Is anyone making programmatic use of the INFO> lines emitted by the
>>\latinfamily command anymore? The reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking
>>about replacing latin.mtx by newlatin.mtx in this command, [...]
>>and this could change some of these messages slightly. I suppose Walter
>>might be using them [...]
>
>I don't quite understand what the use of the INFO lines is,
>apart from telling me what fontinst is doing...

It seems my memory is playing tricks on me. What I was thinking about is
the comments
         %%% WARNING: famtool.pl relies on this message format!!!
that appear in a couple of places in fontinst.sty, but looking at it again
it seems more reasonable that these comments rather refer to the output
line generated by what is _below_ the comment (a non-INFO> line) than what
is above it (an INFO> line). Furthermore all these lines seem to be about
what \transformfont does rather than about what \installfont does, so the
change I was thinking about doing wouldn't affect them. Good!

Still, if these lines are purely for information then it might make sense
to change them so that they would be precisely the commands that will be
executed (with {}s instead of the <>s). Also, it would be nice to hear if
anyone currently is using the famtool.pl that relies on these messages
(whichever they are).

>>but I would also suspect that he may anyway have overridden the
>>fontinst.sty definition of \latin_encodings in his production set-up and
>>thus wouldn't be affected.
>
>Normally I don't use \latinfamily in my "production environment",
>anyway.

Good for you!

>Thus, the change will not constitute a problem for me.

Lars Hellström