[luatex] dump a tfm to a file

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:33:26 +0200 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:

>> I know nothing about tex4ht except that it exists and is annoyingly hard
>> to set up right (which is exactly why that is the only thing I know
>> about it).

And this from the user of a system which so hard to set up that it
breaks permanently in miktex ;-) 

Actually I don't think that tex4ht is overly complicated, but yes
tex4ht it is not really easy to debug or to get details right or to
expand. 

One central problem is that not much of its "inner working" is
known. Eitan Gurari was always very helpful on c.t.t. If someone
mentioned a bug or a feature request a new beta arrived. But as far
as I know he was the only one who worked with the source and
actually understood what the various pieces do. And while there is
some code documentation it is not helpful as it contains a lot of
personal remarks, e-mail snippets and obviously simply evolved over
time. And this makes it difficult to find a new maintainer, or
someone who can help with problems and insights.

But on the other side texh4t contains a lot of useful code. I was
quite impressed some days ago when I could convert a document
containing a biblatex bibliography without much problems to an open
office document. And the html generation is really quite powerful
and sophisticated. It would be a pity if one would do all the work
again instead of trying first if it can be reused and adapted.


>> But if there is a dedicated format that tex4ht understands,
>> then it should be quite straightforward to create such a file based on
>> the internal metrics representation, especially if it is a human-readable
>> format.
> 
> It is. See:
>     /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/tex4ht/ht-fonts/unicode/lm/lm-ec.htf

tex4ht doesn't use only this htf-files. At first it loads the tfm's
of the fonts mentioned in the dvi (I don't know exactly why).


-- 
Ulrike Fischer