[gentium] font variants for pdflatex

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hi Pavel,

>I added code to the repository that creates (experimental) support for the
>SS01 feature (just the GentiumPlus family, but adding GentiumBook is easy). It

oh, wow, thanks! Just Gentium Plus is enough for me.

>The front-end 'otfinst' doesn't work in TeX Live 2023 out of the box. Probably
>nobody uses it any more.

It’s not part of texlive-full in Debian anyway, so I don’t have it.

>You can also look at the package 'andika' which has the typical a_*.enc files
>generated by otftotfm. The a_*.enc files contain the otftotfm command that was
>used.
>
>It might also help you to convert the *.tfm files to readable *.pl files using
>'tftopl'. Reading the *.pl files gives you the idea, what the *.tfm files
>contain.

Oh wow, thanks for this massive amount of extra information, so I can
help myself later if needed.

>I'm not sure if the package should support all possible OpenType features or
>if it should just provide the scripts to create support for just those
>features that someone needs. Any ideas are welcome and I may incorporate them
>in the next version of the package.

Given just how many stylistic variants the Gentium Plus fonts have,
I doubt the package itself should support them all. If there is
_significant_ interest in one or two variants it might be useful to
ship them (e.g. single-story a and g is important to elementary
school teachers), but that might lead to more complaints about
others missing. Plus this is for {,pdf}{,la}tex users only IIUC.

Giving users a way to generate what they need is probably better.
AFAIR we only need to copy the resulting tfm, fd, and maybe vf(?)
files into the project to use them, as they can just use the ttf
or pfb from the installed gentium-tug package. (No idea about vf,
I had that bundled in an old old $dayjob project for a paid-for
font.) A .sty is not necessarily needed either as just setting
\rmdefault suffices.

I’ve not yet had any time to look at this further, I won’t have
it short-term, but I’ll definitely look at this and maybe script
the “full” solution myself and contribute it here.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
„Cool, /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples/uhr.gz ist ja ein Grund,
mksh auf jedem System zu installieren.“
	-- XTaran auf der OpenRheinRuhr, ganz begeistert
(EN: “[…]uhr.gz is a reason to install mksh on every system.”)