[Fontinst] reglyphing and kerns

[Dr. Clea F. Rees]

I am working with an enormous font containing several latin and greek
alphabets. To install a particular alphabet, I'm using reglyphing. For
example:
 	\renameglyph{A}{some-other-A}
This is fine but I have an issue with kerning. I seem unable to get rid
of all the kerns I need to get rid of while retaining the ones I need.
That is, I end up with kerning for the original 'A' applied to
'some-other-A'.

Using the trick from csckrn.mtx:
 	\resetcommand\iftokeep#1\then{\ifnum 0<#1}
has helped considerably but this still retains kerns for any character
which has been renamed. In particular, if the original font includes
a kern from 'A' to 'some-other-A' then I end up with:
 	\setkern{A}{A}{25}
and if the glyph 'minute' has been renamed to 'prime' and there is a
kern in the original font from 'A' to 'minute', then I end up with:
 	\setkern{A}{prime}{-147}
This is obviously not what I want because there is no kern from
'some-other-A' to either 'some-other-A' or 'minute' in the original
font. On the other hand, I cannot turn off kerning altogether because
there are kerns for 'some-other-A' which I need to retain
(specifically, kerns to uni200B which need to be remapped to kerns to
'prime' as the skew character for OMS).

I'm totally fed up and frustrated. (This is not the fault of anybody so
please don't think I am suggesting for one second otherwise. I'm simply
explaining why I'm asking for advice.) I'd appreciate any advice anyone
can give me for dealing with an enormous font which contains almost (but
not quite) all the symbols and letters needed for a maths setup as well
as many text characters.

In particular, I would like to know if it would be better to create
either subsetted AFMs or subsetted fonts and, if so, what the best way
to do that might be. But any other suggestions would be equally welcome.

afm2pl doesn't seem to be an option because I do need characters from
more than one font (e.g. I need to take dotlessi and dotlessj from the
separate text fonts for maths italic) and it doesn't seem to have a
mechanism for inserting maths-specific slot commands such as those
needed for OMX.

Thanks very much,
cfr