What about TFM ? (was Re: [pdftex] Math Pdftex extensions ?)

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hi Paul,

Paul Pichaureau wrote:
> Le dimanche 15 janvier 2006 à 23:33:15, vous écriviez :
> 
> HH> i'm not so sure of that; maybe not tfm, but by means of primitives, we
> HH> need to be able to tweak font/glyph characteristics; also, we nee dto be
> HH> able to 'create new fonts or combinations of glyphs'; open type fonts 
> HH> may not be complete, not be suitable for a task etc; probably most open
> HH> type fonts  can be used out of the box then, but  tex(ies) have a 
> HH> reputation of a need-to-tweak
> 
> We don't need new primitive here, since virtual fonts can do most of
> the job.

When we are talking about opentype, tfm+vf is not a suitable
format (8bit with lots of limitations) so some rethinking
is needed anyway.

Most TeX gurus prefer to write TeX macros instead of virtual font
definitions (vpl files). If there is a way to define the virtual
font using TeX itself, that would lower the bar considerably.

> For the end-user, it is the perfect scenario: all the otf file he
> stores in a directory are immediately usable by tex.
 >
 > Of course, in a first time, some features are not accessible, some
 > characters could be missing, etc. In this case, some guru will produce
 > one day a good virtual file, with all the tweaking needed, and the
 > whole font is usable with only two files ! (Yes, I'm dreaming !).

I believe we should aim for that. For a straightforward text font,
most, if not all, needed information is in the font itself.

Cheers,
Taco