[Fontinst] Re: Bug in fontinstversion{1.927}

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 31.01.2005 um 20:04 schrieb Lars Hellström:

> At 13.40 +0100 2005-01-31, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>> Am 30.01.2005 um 16:25 schrieb Lars Hellström:

>>  The fontinst names are descriptions of glyph shapes, whereas the 
>> Unicode
> standard is very explicit that its characters are _not_.

Sorry, I really can't understand what you are trying to express again! 
Could you put in some different words? Do you mean that characters in 
Unicode are not explicit, I mean, an X could be a u too? Or somethinf 
completely different, maybe based on whether I can read Arabic or what? 
Or what is your statement meaning? That with the wrong Beziers you 
cannot get something right?


> (And the comparison 8a/8r probably was the first example of
> why it was _necessary_ to transcend the numbers: most 8a-encoded fonts 
> have
> glyphs that are not listed in the encoding, e.g. odieresis. Reencoding 
> is
> one way of doing that.)

Therefore 8a is a very bad example to choose. My 8p encoding is true 
and open not hiding anything.

> Internally in fontinst, glyph names are just like variable names and 
> can be
> changed however one likes

So there is no risk to take a Perl script and make those deviating 
glyph names in the 8p AFM file or the created MTX files become those in 
fontinst known and used. Or am I wrong again?

>  As far as things one does at \installfont time are concerned, there 
> is no risk that such name changes
> can ever leak out to a PS interpreter, but name changes followed by a
> \transformfont can screw up your encoding.

So best advice is obviously: do it to the AFM file! Before anything 
could hit the trousers. (Although I still think of not using 
\transformfont, but only in case someone adopts my solution ...)

>>> Selecting glyphs by Unicode character is even at best an
>>> imperfect mechanism, so there are tasks at which it will fail. (Cf. 
>>> the
>>> tex-fonts list posting on ttf2afm by Laurent SIEBENMANN recently.)
>>
>> Yes, I did understand that he is doing the same mistake
>
> You mean Han The Thanh (Laurent merely forwarded a mail) is doing a
> mistake? Ha! Not very likely in this case.

Actually it was Dr. Thanh who wrote he was going to make the same 
mistake as me: taking Unicode indices, I mean numbers. Not names ...

>>> And, to reiterate, I think \reglyphfont can do what you wanted
>>> \translatefont to do, even though it doesn't quite have the interface
>>> you
>>> imagined.
>>
>> In my understanding of \reglyphfont it is not the same as the proposed
>> \translatefont because it needs to know both *names* ("to" and
>> particularly "from")
>
> Yes.
>
>> exactly which I try to avoid because it's sheer
>> nonsense to write routines for literally thousands of deviating names
>> that can change with re- or new release!
>
> They don't. At worst there could be something like half a dozen (per 
> glyph)
> different names around, mostly because different foundries are using
> different names, but they don't increase much over time.

In the end you'll end up with a few hundred, more than thousand useless 
and completely superfluous names that you need to handle by releasing 
every few weeks a new version when a new name is being found somewhere 
and reported.

That's an example of terrorism by software.

What's wrong in leaving the bed with the left foot first? OK, I don't 
know, I prefer multi-tasking and parallel execution and so I am using 
both feet at the same time to leave bed. I mean, what's important, 
that's the result, as our big old chancellor Dr. Helmut Kohl (2m, 2 
decitons) said before grabbing the GDR. I still do not understand what 
the danger of translating names is. Couldn't you give some more 
practical example that I could follow and understand? All your abstract 
writing does not mean a thing to me because there is no anchor in it I 
could get a grip off and evolve some understanding from. Is it like the 
human who took the bus with the right encoding (Nr. 42) but which went 
into the wrong direction?

What I can't understand I can't practise.

--
Greetings

   Pete

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped. - Groucho Marx