[Fontinst] Hello

[Lars Hellström]

Dailer Fonticiella Morell skrev 2015-06-23 03.36:
> I am trying to install some fonts in my TeX distribution (MiKTeX 2.9)
> unsuccesfuly, then I found fontinst, it appears to do this.

It does _part_ of it. Whether it is the part you're having problem with is 
another matter.

> But I want
> to know how to do it. Appart from other distributions, MiKTeX does not
> have a classical tree (e.g LOCALTEXFM\..., TEXFM\...)

Oh? All MikTeX installations I've seen was using the TDS tree structure. But 
you rather seem to think about the practice of having _multiple_ TDS trees, 
which I suppose is a more recent development, yes. (Or at least its 
widespread adoption is; I'm pretty certain the multiple tree concept as such 
was very much implicit in the design of Karl Berry's kps tools from the 
start, and that is early-to-mid 1990s. TDS and kps are formally quite 
independent, though.)

Not that it matters as far as fontinst is concerned, since fontinst is quite 
directory structure ignorant. Fontinst is about generating the files (La)TeX 
needs to understand the fonts, not about "installing" those files in places 
where TeX will find them.

> and I think it
> may be a problem. Can you tell me how to install any font (ttf, otf)
> in Windows using MiKTeX?

Short answer: No. (I'm not a MikTeX user. I wouldn't expect any particular 
problems, though; MikTeX might even be more straightforward than e.g. unixy 
texlive, by having fewer layers of indirection to account for.)

Slightly longer answer: ttf and otf are fairly new font formats, as far as 
the TeX world is concerned. Different TeX programs can be very differently 
skilled in making use of them.

There is an old style way of doing it, which in principle works on any TeX, 
and where fontinst is a powerful tool for bridging the gap between non-TeX 
and TeX font formats. Power means in particular that you can intervene and 
fiddle with the fine details. Fontinst needs various helpers for dealing 
with binary file formats, though.

Then there is a new style way of doing it, where the TeX engine is extended 
to work with otf and ttf fonts directly. In this case we're talking things 
like xetex or luatex, possibly some variants of pdftex. This is kind of a 
moving target, so I'm not really up to date on what the state of the art is 
there.


Lars Hellström