[Fontinst] Two questions about 8y.etx and t1.etx

[Lars Hellström]

At 15.58 +0200 2004-09-13, Peter Harmand wrote:
>Can somebody help me with the following:
>
>Shouldn't there be a definition of Euro at slot 1 in 8y.etx?

Looking at texnansi.enc, there is indeed a /Euro in slot 1, and thus 8y.etx
should have that as well, but apparently no-one has noticed this before.

It might be advicable to examine the history of this, though. There has
been some heated debates over "8r vs. 8y" in the past, and I don't recall
ever seeing the Euro used as an argument there (even though there seems to
have been some five years when it was in 8y but not in 8r), which suggests
very few people ever noticed this fact. That the @psencodingfile header of
the texnansi.enc where I see this Euro hasn't been updated since 1996 is
also strange.

>t1.etx sets fontdimens 8--16, but apparently not as math fontdimens, but
>as the file says as "extra EC fontdimens". What does this mean?

That it contains the same set of extra fontdimens as the fonts in the EC
family do. In fontinst v1.926 or newer there are symbolic names for these
fontdimens and the encspecs.tex file (in doc/encspecs of the fontinst
distro) defines them.

>Where and
>for what purpose are these extra fontdimens used?

In principle anywhere you want to take advantage of the extra typographic
information. In practice not much, because LaTeX (as the main format) has
very little support for making use of information in fonts.

Lars Hellström