[texhax] Need help with virtual fonts

[Joel Coltoff]

Hi,

I've got a question that goes beyond what I know about virtual fonts.
It may not be the best solution but I'd like to explore it anyway. I
suspect that what I'd like is best done by explicit font switches rather
than a virtual font. Let's say I have an alternate roman font that has
a small number of fancy characters that can be used at the end of a word.

I've used fontinst to install expert fonts and am comfortable with
simple edits of the properties files. What is different about this
case than adding an "ffl" ligature is that I only want to make the
substitution if the next character is a space. I'm not sure, and
haven't tested (shame on me), how this will work. I suppose I could
always turn an 'n' followed by a space into a fancy 'n' and then
kern a little but wouldn't this interfere with the normal interword
spacing that TeX tries to do? Would this part of the code even see
the space? I'm guessing it doesn't.

On a related note the font also has a "ct" ligature. How can I make
sure it doesn't use this at the end of a word? In the ideal world
I wouldn't need to use curly braces to get the effec{t} I want. Suppose
I don't want all my word ending 'n' to be from the alternate font. Can
I set it up so that I need 'n', space, space (can you say ugly) to turn
it on?

Perhaps, as I said earlier, I should just use explicit font changes to
get what I want. What I don't like about this is I change the entire
font for the document then I need to remove all of them.

Thanks for your insights.

-- 
Joel Coltoff

It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity.
     -- Albert E. Einstein