[Fontinst] Bug in fontinstversion{1.927}

[Lars Hellström]

At 12.07 +0100 2005-01-04, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>Am 03.01.2005 um 17:53 schrieb Lars Hellström:
>
>> Also, I have to ask: Is the font you're working with really a "Sun
>> LucidaSans Bold Typewriter", as is the Fontname scheme interpretation
>> of
>> 'slsbt'?
>
>Well, it depends on your (mis)interpretation. The fonts contain a
>Copyright from Bigelow & Holmes, but they come with Java. And for free.
>Java comes from Sun. Since I am not sure whether the TrueType fonts use
>exactly the same shaped glyphs as any PostScript versions around I have
>this working title in use. Besides this: TrueType uses other mechanisms
>to find the outlines of the glyphs -- so they have to be different than
>the PostScript ones. And this their name must preserve.

TrueType outlines can be losslessly converted to PostScript Type 1, since
the quadratic Bezier curves are a subset of the cubic Bezier curves. I
don't know to what extent ttf1pt1 manages this---most likely there are some
rounding errors, but these are probably not large enough to be visible.

>OK, I'll do it! I only have no 8x.enc file around ... Is it really
>standardized or is it just created for an expert PS font to reflect its
>opulence?

The Postscript Language Reference Manual
(http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/PLRM.pdf)(7.5M) contains
a specification of this encoding. It's also one of the standard encodings
in PDF (under the name MacExpertEncoding), see
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html for
details. One seldom reencodes to it though, because 8x fonts usually have
all their glyphs available in the default encoding.

>>> 	name="8+.mtx"
>>
>> This one does not make sense. Take for example
>>
>>   \ifisglyph{Abreve}\then
>>      \unfakable{Abreve}
>>   \Fi
>
>I'm not understanding all the code.

Is this with or without RTFM? (The manual has by the way been extended a
bit with v1.928.)

>From looking on the character
>tables and comparing them with the proofs that t1testpage makes from
>the 'original' PS font I was prone to believe that fontinst preferred
>to construct a whole set of accented characters

No, it only builds a glyph if it isn't already present in some font.

> -- because you would
>not find them in PostScript. Hungarumlaut is badly constructed, but
>this too is still a preliminary opinion, a prejudice.

I've too felt it didn't look good. In fact, one of the examples in the
manual shows how to use loops to automate the task of experimenting with
better positions for this glyph.

>Some days (or
>weeks) later I might have a more solid basis. My opinion of the code
>above is: if there is a real glyph Abreve take it and don't fake it.

OK, then you need to RTFM, in particular Subsection 4.1 on variables (of
the most recent manual); glyphs are just another kind of variable to
fontinst.

The name \unfakable is perhaps unfortunate. What this command really means
is "There is no way that fontinst can fake this, so just set this glyph to
a blob so that it is noticable when it is absent from a document."

Lars Hellström