[pdftex] font expansion and virtual fonts

[The Thanh Han]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 04:41:34PM +0100, Oliver Heins wrote:
> I've experimented with pdftex's feature "font expansion" and must say
> that I'm very much impressed.  The result looks great!
> 
> However, I don't know get it to work with virtual fonts (say a font
> named pegr9d.tfm).  Yesterday night, during the local TUG meeting there
> was the suggestion to try it with Thanh's mktextfm hack
> (<ftp://ftp.cstug.cz/pub/tex/local/cstug/thanh/pdftex/ext>).
> Unfortunately, we didn't get it to work.
> 
> We invoked the new script with "sh -v mktextfm putr8a+20" for an easy
> run.  On the first try, we ran into an error saying "\_a_true" was
> undefined.  Adding a line "\newif\if_a_" in ufntinst.sty helped for this
> one, but then came a new error, saying "\record_transform" is
> undefined.
> 
> Then, all the experts said: Uhhh, ask Thanh.  So I'm doing. :-)
> 
> Below is the output of "sh -v mktextfm putr8a+20"

I suppose that you want to experiment with font expansion with type1 fonts.
Then the easiest way is to generate the expanded metrics manually, let's say
by a script. The hacked mktextfm script depends on too many things so
chances that it works on your environment without modiffication is really
low.

I had a script to generate il2-encoded metrics, however it is are a little
bit complicated because of non-standard way of making composed glyphs (the
uppercase and lowercase accents are different). I suggest to get start from
scratch by writing by yourself some simple script to generate pegr9d.tfm
and all needed metrics for its use (like pegr9d.vf and pegr8r.tfm). You can
use afm2tfm or fontinst to do so -- I tried both and fontinst is more
difficult to use but aslo more flexible and realiable, IMHO.

Once you have it done, it should be easy to change the script so it can
generate eg pegr9d+10.tfm and its friends. 

Then run the script to generate the following variants:
pegr9d+20 
pegr9d+15 
pegr9d+10 
pegr9d+5 
pegr9d-20 
pegr9d-15 
pegr9d-10 
pegr9d-5 

Regards,
Thanh