[Fontinst] OpenType, otftotfm, and fontinst

[Ulrich Dirr]

Hi.

In the last weeks I was experimenting with OpenType integration into
TeX. A great tool in this respect is otftotfm but sometimes I would
like to control the whole process more transparently, and thus it
would be great if I could use fontinst.

One point is that OpenType fonts often differ in the amount of glyphs.
On the other side I don't want to restrict the fonts for further
processing by fontinst by using, e.g., 8a encoding as a starting
point.

My idea is to have a kind of "generic", "big" encoding file which I
can use for pre-processing by otftotfm (which ideally would recognize
all glyphs) and feed the resulting PL file into fontinst for the next
steps. Such a big PL file I could use for all 8r/8x/9e/9c, or
ornament/oldstyle/swash/smallcaps variants, or whatever I want to use
with TeX. 

What comes to mind instantly would be some kind of unicode encoding
file. Does this exist? I know that an inputenc file 'utf8' by
Dominique Unruh exists but I'm not aware of any dvips enc file (which
otftotfm needs) for utf8 or similar.

Another benefit would be that one could use the fontinst 'standard'
\xscalefont command for pdftex's font expansion feature (it's more
economic to have only the base font in the mapping file and let pdftex
choose the other). Because when using otftotfm directly for this I got
a mess of font map entries like 'WarnockPOscBoldItalic-20--base
WarnockPro-BoldIt "0.98 ExtendFont AutoEnc_elkn5hsf5csydavpi4ctzhxt3h
ReEncodeFont" <[a_elkn5h.enc <WarnockPro-BoldIt.pfb', etc. pp.

What do you think is the best way to go?

Best regards,
Ulrich Dirr