[Fontinst] typo in resetsc.mtx

[Lars Hellström]

At 19.06 +0200 2004-04-11, David Dickey wrote:
>The current version of resetsc.mtx on ctan
>(ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/fontinst/inputs/latinmtx/resets
>c.mtx)
>has the following typo:
>
>...
>\smallcapsglyph{Xsmall}{x}
>\smallcapsglyph{Xsmall}{y}
>\smallcapsglyph{Zsmall}{z}
>...
>The second Xsmall should of course be Ysmall.

Thanks! I've fixed this in my master copy.

>While examining the file, I also noticed a couple of other things, but
>I'm not really expert enough on fontinst to know if these are as they
>should be:
>
>First, the kerning pairs are not renamed except for a-z. Why not for the
>entire set of smallcaps characters?

Probably because it is (or at least was) rather uncommon that the other
characters have kerning pairs. Reglyphing the font instead will preserve
all kerns.

>Second, there are no f-ligs. Many sc fonts do have at least FIsmall and
>FLsmall (as fi and fl). Are these substitutions missing intentionally?

In most fonts, proper FIsmall and FLsmall will look identical to the fakes
fontinst (latin.mtx and friends) makes, so it usually doesn't matter.

>Admittedly, these are not really (afaik) real ligatures, but they do
>usually occur in SCOsF fonts. Are f-ligatures faked in small caps fonts?

As a rule, yes.

>I can imagine that if one used some package to letterspace the
>smallcaps, you wouldn't want to use the ligatures as such, but the same
>would be true of any ligatures, so surely any such package would make
>provisions to turn off ligaturing, wouldn't it?

Letterspacing in TeX will kill all ligaturing and kerning anyway. Pretty
much any command that isn't fully expandable or tells TeX to typeset a
character will do that, by causing TeX to jump out of the "inner loop" in
which it handles ligaturing and kerning. (This is why {} in shelf{}ful
prevents ligaturing the ff.)

>Finally, aren't the stand-alone accents in smallcaps fonts scaled to the
>lowercase (=smallcaps) ?

Hard to say in general. (In particular cases you do of course always have
to option to look at the result and change things if they don't look good.)

>They are in the font I'm trying to install.
>Should they be renamed as:
>
>breve Brevesmall
>caron Caronsmall
>cedilla Cedillasmall
>dieresis Dieresissmall
>dotaccent Dotaccentsmall
>macron Macronsmall
>ogonek Ogoneksmall
>ring Ringsmall

Well, it depends.

latin.mtx and latinsc.mtx will try to use Brevesmall (and similarly named
accents) if they exist. If they don't then it will "fake" them by scaling
down the usual accents, which probably isn't what one wants. In that case I
would rename as you show.

newlatin.mtx uses the usual accents when building accented smallcaps letters.

Lars Hellström