[Fontinst] Latin Modern fonts: small caps and accents

[Lars Hellström]

Dr. Clea F. Rees skrev:
> 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

Numbered fontdimens in AFMs? News to me, unless you mean AFM keywords 
corresponding to acccapheight and maxheight.

> 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.

One fontdimen that is likely to be important is xheight (fontdimen 5), 
as TeX's \accent primitive assumes the accent character specified is in 
the proper position for a glyph with \height{}=xheight. If for example 
the smallcaps xheight is larger than the regular xheight, but you're 
using the regular accent in the smallcaps font, then you would get the 
effect that it is placed too low.

Lars Hellström

> 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
>