[Fontinst] Re: TeX and fonts...

[Werner LEMBERG]

>     I spent the week-end trying (successfully) to get TeX to recognize 
> a Type1 font of me.

Congratulations!

>     The process seemed rather laborous to me and I was wondering if
> I might get PfaEdit to automate the task (have it generate the .tfm,
> .vf, .fd files, have it move everything to the right places, have it
> update the map files).

I recommend not to do this for at least two reasons:

  . It is not the job of pfaedit to do such things.  pfaedit is a
    font editor, not a TeX font installation program.

  . If you really want to do it properly, you have to spend an
    enormous amount of time to make it work out of the box.  I'm
    rather sure that it is better to invest time into pfaedit itself.

On the other hand, it is a good idea to make pfaedit emit some help
information to make the conversion work easily.  For example, pfaedit
could create proper encoding vector files for dvips (with proper
LIGKERN hints) if asked for.

>     While I feel I might have enough info to do this for latin
> fonts, I still have no idea how to install
> 	* math symbol, italic, ...
> 	* cyrillic
> 	* greek
> 	* CJK
> 	...
> fonts. And I thought you might be able to either help me or point me
> at documentation.

I'm possibly not the right person here (except for CJK :-) -- you
should talk to the fontinst people (I've CCed the list).

>      First of all, do these fonts also use the strange filename 
> encoding that fontinst seems to insist on? and if so, what are the 
> abreviations for, say, the T2 encodings (that is if fonts in TeX Base 
> encoding end in 8r what does T2A mod 2 end in)?

Good question.  I've also CCed Vladimir Volovich, the author of the
cm-super package; I think he can answer this best.


    Werner