[pdftex] Status of \pdfadjustspacing

[Felix Neubauer]

Hartmut Henkel wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, John Culleton wrote:
> > When I attempted to use the \pdftajustspacing feature it seemed not
> > to work. When I set up my body font with a statement like:
> > \font\rm= bchr8r at 9pt stretch 30 shrink 20 step 10
> >
> > ....the extra parameters were simply printed as text.
> >
> > Does anyone have any additional information on this feature?
>
> Seems there are a few problems: First, kpathsea complains about TFM
> font names with numeric (expanded) extensions "Illegal
> fontname...contains '+'" (e. g. cmr12+50, which would mean that the
> TFM is expanded by 50/1000 in width). 

This works for me without problems (kpathsea version 3.5.2,web2c 7.5.2, 
pdfTeX 1.11b).

> [...]

> So, loose ends seem about to be the kpathsea patch, automatisms to
> create patched mf's (they must exist, but where?), the automatic
> modification and renaming of non-pk fonts by changing their
> /FontMatrix to fake the Expand by an Extend, the segfault in pdftex.

There used to be a patched version of the mktextfm script which 
supported automatic font expansion for the CM fonts and their 
Vietnamese and Czech extensions.The script has been removed from CTAN 
with the obsolete pdfTeX versions 0.1x., but you can still find it at 
this address:

<ftp://ftp.cstug.cz/pub/tex/local/cstug/thanh/pdftex/ext/>

Support for Type 1 fonts was limited to multiple master fonts and the 8z 
encoding IIRC. (I never got this to work).

The (currently) only feasible way to use font expansion with Type 1 
fonts seems to be to create the .tfms and .vfs using fontinst in 
advance.

Regards,
Felix
-- 
Felix Neubauer, felix.neubauer at gmx.de