Re: fonts fonts and fonts

[S2P development <taco.hoekwater@wkap.nl>]

Christoph Dreyer wrote:
> 
> 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.

fontinst is a confusing affair. While it is fairly easy to install
a simple text font with it, it is very hard to do something complicated.
People keep telling me that it's possible, but it doesnt make a lot
of sense to me. 

Also, I don't understand why it was coded in TeX (don't tell me it is
for ease of use ... it's not easy to use ... and it's not helpful for 
portability ... fontinst doesn't even do any of the non-portable stuff). 

In short: I don't like fontinst, nor will I ever. But it does make 
sense to create an 8t/7t encoded tfm along with the texnansi one for 
context. 

> > 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.

In general, this is the easy part (at least for all TDS-conforming
distributions).

> > - 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.

updmap is a hack. I'm sure Thomas would be happy to replace it
with something cleaner.

> > 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?

For metric files, basically. Right?

Y&Y still have the tfm files for the full Adobe library on-line, which 
is basically the same idea hans is going for. Have a look at:

    http://www.yandy.com/usely1.htm

> > 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.

I believe that if you do all of the hard work yourself anyway, that
it is probably a better idea to replace fontinst alltogether. (But,
as I said earlier, keeping the functionality intact). 

Technically: it is easy to replace 8r (the so-called Adobe Raw encoding)
with 8y (texnansi) as the base encoding on top of which you can build
the 8-bit latex virtual font version. 

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

I lost track, really. :-)

texnansi is generally the easiest encoding to install, so most of the
simple fonts I used had that encoding, and most of the hard ones had
'do-it-yourself' encodings. (trying to fit e.g. TimesExpert into the 
'text companion' encoding is just too much work for me).

Greetings, Taco