[Fontinst] The fontinst manual

[Philipp Lehman]

Am Dienstag, 27. Juli 2004 16:56 schrieb Lars Hellström:
> At 16.58 +0200 04-07-26, Philipp Lehman wrote:
> >Am Sonntag, 25. Juli 2004 17:56 schrieb Lars Hellström:
> >http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/Type1fonts/fontinstallationguide/
>
> Very nice! Very, very nice! (Red ink as second colour; I like that. Much
> better than the blue used in The LaTeX Companion. But why "Tex" rather than
> the standard \TeX? The name of the program is <Tau><Epsilon><Chi>, and I'm
> pretty sure lower case epsilons don't look like that "e".)

The truth is, I'm on a secret mission to erase the Tex logo from the face of 
the planet. Logos don't have any business in body copy. Since the Tex logos 
look particularly silly, I decided not to use them in any titles either.

It's a consistent thing, by the way. I'm also writing "Postscript" and not 
"PostScript". I firmly believe that typography must not bow to marketing hype 
or legal mumbo jumbo (as is the case with the Tex logo, mind you).

> >I guess the most fundamental question is if you want the manual to be a
> >tutorial or rather a reference manual.
>
> I generally prefer the latter (regardless of language), but I'm probably
> abnormal.

Not neccessarily. I'd like to see a well-structured reference manual as well, 
but in addition to some task-oriented documentation. With a command reference 
at hand you're still lost when you're using fontinst for the first time. It 
just doesn't teach you any strategies.

> As for index and such, have you tried using fisource.dvi? (It's hard to get
> a more fine-grained index than that.)

Certainly, but that's a bit too fine-grained for my taste if I just want to 
look up the syntax of a specific macro.

> >> % Fontinst needs to read afm files.
> >> TEXINPUTS.fontinst = .;$TEXMF/tex//;$TEXMF/fonts/afm//
> >
> >Unless I'm getting something wrong that requires calling kpathsea with
> >"--format fontinst" though, so it will not really work in practice ;)
>
> FWIW, I think Tetex has a "fontinst" script which mostly boils down to
>
>  tex -progname=fontinst \&tex ${1+"$@"}

Ah, nice idea. I've never use that, though.

-- 
Philipp Lehman <lehman at gmx.net>