[luatex] dump a tfm to a file

[Taco Hoekwater]

On 06/21/2011 09:50 AM, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
>
> I know that normal tfm's should contain only 256 chars. But after
> all a tfm is more or less only a long list of
>   (CHARACTER<number>
>    (CHARWD ...)).
>
> So I don't see a logical reason why one shouldn't be able to
> generate a large tfm with the informations of more characters (and

It would not be a TFM if it allowed more than 256 glyphs. TFM is
a binary format with fixed sizes for various fields (expressed in bits).
The 'human-readable' PL format is a dump of a TFM file, so that is
derived from TFM, not the other way around.

OFM (Omega's extensions to TFM) allows 65536 glyphs which is more,
but still not enough to encode Unicode Math properly. I do not
think there is *any* extension to TFM anywhere that supports the
full Unicode range.

> luatex is generating large "virtual tfm" with metrics information).

It is convenient to think of it that way, but what actually happens
is that luatex fills a C data structure by extracting information
from a lua table. Nowhere in that process is tfm or vf format used
directly.

Best wishes,
Taco