Re: Fonts again in ConTeXt

[Maarten Sneep <sneep@nat.vu.nl>]

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 16:10, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 11, 2003, at 09:46  AM, Patrick Gundlach wrote:
> > Yes and no... ConTeXt is looking for fonts with names that are totally
> > unusual compared to the ordinary TeX (LaTeX) System. Most TeX systems
> > (and I guess GW TeX as well) support psnfss, the postscript font
> > system to be used with latex. That means, that you should have fonts
> > named in a cryptic way "pplr8r.tfm" or such. ConTeXt on the other hand
> > looks for fontnames like "8r-uplr8a.tfm". Almost no one has a font
> > named like this on their system.
>
> This kind of thing is just silly.  The above named file is no more
> clearly named than the psnfss version, so what's the point?

It is clearer: the first bit gives the encoding and the latter bit is the 
name of the file containign the glyphs (uplr8a.pfb). OTOH since LaTeX already 
creates a lot of font-mess, I do agree that there is no need to add more to 
the trouble already there. I would like to see a few sym-links (does Windows 
have something like that?) to add a few names to the tree to make sure 
everything works as planned. 

Since texfont uses afm2tfm directly (and the tfm files that come with psnfss 
are hand tuned) I don't think that using texfont blindly is a very good idea. 
It would be better to use the existing tfm files. The dvips documentation on 
aft2tfm lists what's been added to the tfm's in the psnfss collection, I 
cannot recall this right now.

Cheers,

Maarten Sneep