Re: How to use PostScript font

["Patrick Gundlach" <patrick@gundla.ch>]

Hello Hans,

>>And the argument about being too LaTeXy: the encoding of these files
>>is not LaTeX specific (besides from the fact that LaTeX can only
>>handle T1/OT1 encoding right), so what is not generic about them?
>>  
> if you run afm2tfm on some files you get different results that the
> handcrafted' ones that come with distributions; (afm2pl for instance
> defaults to different metrics [esp spacing] than afm2tfm); many of
> these things are not really documented and done by people who use
> latex and know about latex internals (for instance how they deal with
> spacing); concerning generic ... 

Yes, but you stated that "different metrics, different subpaths, urw
instances either or not present". Different metrics? I can't see any
differences in metrics between differnent distributions on those
fonts! Can you? They come from one source, i.e psnfss. Different
subpaths? Perhaps, but what is the problem? Kpathsea is taking care of
this. URW or not to URW? Good question, lets get started on this
subject :-)) If we accept that there is such thing as "psnfss", which
is preinstalled on almost all TeX systems out there, we can let the
user decide: use "psnfss-metrics" or the ones generated by $TOOL. And
I can't see any problems with the spacing with those fonts being too
LaTeX related. We should be happy about those fonts, since we get
good fonts (in terms of encodings/spacing/finetuning) for free from
the LaTeX side.

You are right that there are many other things being to LaTeX related.
The situation is getting much better. A few years ago the distributions
only knew about LaTeX. I had major problems with old tetex (memory
problems for example), now most things work out of the box. 


[...]

> latex commands in entries) concerning fonts: if you want texnansi
> encoding, there are in most cases no tfm files etc. They are
> mentioned here and there, but often not on the system. It took me a
> while to find out that -because of that- i could not use precoockes
> metrics at all -)

Who needs texnansi anyway? (OK, perhaps there are few who really need
texnansi :-), but we might aks Mr. psnfss to generate texnansi metrics as
well). 

[...]

Patrick
-- 
ConTeXt wiki: http://contextgarden.net
texshow-web:  http://texshow.contextgarden.net
List archive: http://archive.contextgarden.net