[Fontinst] fontinstallationguide: building of smallcaps font

[Lars Hellström]

Plamen Tanovski skrev 2012-07-29 11.48:
> Hi,
>
> I've sent this notice years ago to the author of
> fontinstallationguide, but at that time the file was already out of
> maintenance. So here is the problem described for the record: the
> guide builds the smallcaps using t1.etx, i.E.:
>
> \installfont{psbrcj8t}{psbrc8r,newlatin}{t1}{T1}{psbj}{m}{sc}{}
>
> This is not completely wrong, but if the font doesn't have all
> accented smallcaps needed in T1 (which is almost always the case),
> they will be build to rules of lowercase glyphs (llbuild.mtx). And
> this will make wrong characters. There is an example file included in
> this email (Bembo): the character "dcaron" and "tcaron" for example
> show that wrong way. Building the proper accented smallcaps is done by
> lsbuild.mtx and this file expects lowercase glyph names ending with
> "small". So one need to reglyph the font first (to make all smallcaps
> names end with "small") and then use t1c.etx resp. t1cj.etx.
>
> At that point I wonder, why some of the punctuation is also being
> renamed in csc2x.tex:
>
> \renameglyph{ampersandsmall}{ampersand}
> \renameglyph{centoldstyle}{cent}
> \renameglyph{dollaroldstyle}{dollar}

Because the goal is to preserve as much glyph variation as possible. If the 
ampersand from the csc font is different from the one in the regular font, 
then one might want to choose between them at the VPL generation phase, and 
this requires giving them different names in the glyphbase.

> This way this glyphs are practically kicked out of the virtual font.

They won't be picked by default, but they're still available in the glyphbase.

> Maybe we need a command \punct similar to \digit to cover the
> different punctuation (whole currency set, exclamation amd question
> marks and their down variants, number sign and ampersand) in smallcaps
> fonts?

Could be one way to go, but would depend on the naming of punctuation to be 
somehow regular; if the suffix to add is sometimes "small" and other times 
"oldstyle" then several \punct macros would be needed. Do you have a ready 
suggestion for such a macro system, or are you just throwing out the idea?

An alternative could be to equip the ETX files with an option that makes 
them omit these punctuation characters. Then one can leave the specification 
of these for a small seperate ETX file.

Yet another alternative could be to explicitly \resetglyph{ampersand} etc. 
as needed; I'd guess these glyphs are few enough that it would be the 
easiest solution.

Lars Hellström