[Fontinst] Latin Modern fonts: small caps and accents

[Dr. Clea F. Rees]

I am trying to update CFRLatinModern for version 2.004 of Latin Modern
(included in TL 2009 which I recently updated to). While I'm at it, I
was hoping to resolve some of the issues which I or others raised about
the earlier version of the package. (The aim of the package is to make
various features of the fonts, especially different styles of figures,
easily accessible in LaTeX.)

The following is bugging me a lot: when using the small-caps version of
the font, accent placement for characters which  must be created "on
the fly" are wrong. Not only are the accents too low for the small-caps
themselves, they are too low for the capital letters as well. So if I'm
using T1 encoding, \^A is fine but \^W and \^Y are not; similarly for
\^a versus \^w and \^y.

I don't expect these characters to look great because TeX is creating
them on the fly, but my package creates output markedly worse than that
produced by using lmodern itself and I cannot figure out why. The
accents are placed much lower so they run into the letter below.

This isn't a problem for the non-small-caps variants of the fonts - the
output produced by my package doesn't look any worse than that output
by lmodern for these characters.

I did notice that fontdimen 10 and 12 differ in lmr10.afm and
lmcsc10.afm. These are both smaller in the case of lmcsc10.afm which
seems odd. But I'm assuming this is just my ignorance since lmodern is
obviously based on these dimensions and everything works fine there.

I'm using fontinst to generate the font files needed from the relevant
afms. Because this takes a very long time to complete on my machine,
I don't really want to do this by trial-and-error alone. Besides, I
have no idea what to try - am definitely out of my depth.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. My package works OK for English
but it really looks bad for Welsh...

- cfr