[pdftex] pdftex.map / virtual fonts / code pages

[G. D. Brettschneider]

RF> Nothing to do with the ascii standard, really;
RF> knuth ignored it when he felt it was inconvenient.
RF> none of knuth's fonts is encoded using pure ascii.

SK> On-the-fly reencoding does NOT require virtual fonts.
SK> Y&Y makes use of this for their texnansi tfms.

PK> There is no way not to use cyrillics, so I am between
PK> two problems: either terrible fonts or no graphics.

TB> Is chance that it could be possible one day to use AE or ZE fonts
TB> and have é be registered as é in the PDF ?

RK> You can run t1disasm on a type1 font to see how é is implemeted
RK> there and then write a program that retrieves information from the
RK> afm/tfm/vpl files and create a new character /eacute and then run
RK> t1asm on that file. If this works, it should be possible to put this
RK> algorithm into pdftex.

Now couldn't we build a more stable system by re-assembling the glyphs 
in the PostScript files according to the Unicode or ISO-8859-X codepages?

They were still unknown the days Knuth proposed vf files, I guess. Will 
TeX survive if it falls back behind internet standards and remains in 
that virtual-cork-non-ascii-non-ansi-mess it has evolved to?

Gerolf