[texhax] ?encoding? suffices in the TeX Live Adobe font TFMs

[Philip TAYLOR]

Dear Reinhard --

 > please excuse the late response, I had, and still have, some problems
 > with my computer.

No problem :-)
 >
 > It's good that you are familiar with plain TeX and TeX primitives.
 > LaTeX and Context provide convenient user interfaces but these are
 > only wrappers.  Let's ignore them ATM.
 >
 > The only way to specify a font in plain TeX is to specify the name of
 > the .tfm file:
 >
 >    \font\rm=cmr10
 >
 >    (means: load cmr10.tfm)
 >
 > This means that each real or virtual font needs its own .tfm file.
 > It's not sufficient to create a new virtual font.  You have to create
 > a new .tfm file too, otherwise the virtual font won't be accessible.

Yes, that part I understand : but if you remember, the query
started with the naming conventions for the Adobe base 35
font TFMs -- for any given font (say, Adobe Times Roman),
there are a large number (six or seven) TFMs, each with
a subtle variant in the name.  So I was assuming (perhaps
wrongly) that there already exist TFMs for the Adobe base
35 fonts collated in the TeX collating sequence (modulo
the missing characters, for which nothing can be done),
and that in order to use these successfully (once I
had identified which TFM corresponded most closely to
(say) ArborText's "PSMTIMR" (PostScript Mapped Times Roman),
all I would then need to do was to create a VP (and thence
VF) to let PdfTeX make use of this.

But I may well be wrong : I often am :-)

** Phil.