Re: Hans' presentation: using plain TEX (from TUG 2009) [apologies if OT]

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 3-4-2010 7:51, Graham Douglas wrote:

> So, is it possible to find and load .afm/.pfb with your luatex-plain
> example. Is that font machinery included in luatex-plain?

the 'generic' code is only providing opentype support and type1/afm goes 
via the regular tex specific tfm route and believe me: i don't even want 
to know how plain users of latex users deal with type 1 as it's already 
messy enough in context; keep in mind that when one uses type 1 one 
often operates in the 8 bit environment and therefore in font encoding 
land; of course you can convert a type 1 into an open type font using 
fontforge

context mkiv can deal with afm/type1 but this is rather context specific 
and i'm not going to impose context methods and strategies as i'm pretty 
sure that non context users are not that willing to adapt to context 
methods

sticking to type 1 is a bad idea anyway and the less it is supported in 
the new engines the better as it forces users to move on

the same is true for math ... the loader does load math fonts but math 
support is always rather macro package specific so one needs to define 
whatever needed (families, symbols etc) the way uses in the specific 
macro package (the same applies here .. in a few years all math fonts 
will be available in open type)

for instance in the lua-latex code, they use the context otf loader for 
open type but it gets encapsulated in latex ways of defining and using 
and as type1 handling is already present in latex (and is shared with 
xetex code i assume) it is not related to lua etc at all, so there is no 
need for additional code

concerning plain: plain has no font system so there's nothing to hook 
code in and as soon as one starts to make a system one should wonder if 
using plain is a good idea; it does not gain you much using plain 
instead of context

concernign context being large ... occasionally i do experiment with 
metatex, a more layered approach for making smaller formats but that's a 
long term effort

> If so, can you suggest why the luatex-plain example
> might be failing with the .afm/.pfb files?

because you need to load the tfm file (which is probably someplace in 
your tex tree)


Hans

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