Re: fonts fonts and fonts

[Christoph Dreyer <reyerd@t-online.de>]

Hi!

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Fonts is still one of the more complicated areas in tex. I have written a
> perl script that can do some of the tasks needed to install a 'commercial'
> font under context. 

Are you using fontinst for this? This should imho be the best way to do
it, because you can also use the font for tex/latex.

> There are several issues that need to be taken care of: 
> 
> - copying fonts the right location in the texmf-local tree

tetex keeps all font-related files in subdirs foundry/fontname, e.g.
fonts/tfm/adobe/minion.

> - generating a map file for pdftex 

This should be easy. But pdftex needs to know about the map file.  For
tetex you have to edit the script updmap and place the name of the new
map file in a variable. After that you need to call updmap, which will
create a new map file for dvips and pdftex.

> - generating font synonyms

The user should tell the script if it's a serif, sansserif or whatever.

> Now, i'm thinking of setting up a font tfm/vf/map repository but first i
> want to knwo if there is any need for that. 

A repository for what? 

> An important issue is the encoding and naming. I know that there are all
> those predefined kb font names, but i never work that way: i just use the
> original names and one encoding. So, we need to make choices as well as
> provide methods, auto map file inclusion etc. It's not that hard actually
> but i can only do this if we agree upon it. I want to get rid of the tex
> font mess -)

Imho it's better to stay with fontinst. But this certainly needs
an easy-to-use frontend. If you tell the user, after fontinst has
completed, that he can now use Minion by \setupbodyfont [minion], then
he won't see anything of the "tex font mess". So the user should use the
real name of the font, but the software the kb names.

> How many of you use fonts other that cmr and what fonts? In what encodings?
> In what combinations?  

I have used the standard pdf fonts, Lucidabright, Utopia, Charter and
the Microsoft Core Fonts. All in texnansi encoding, because I still
don't understand how this encoding stuff works... :-(  But I never
had problems with this. Except that some symbols are taken from
the Computer Modern Math fonts.

Hope this helps.

Christoph