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fontinst v1.13 alpha release



Dear all,

I've now finished the alpha-release of version 1 of the fontinst
package, and it's ready for testing!  The fontinst package can build
Virtual Fonts from Adobe Font Metric files, and:

\item Is written in \TeX, for maximum portabilty (at the cost of speed).
\item Supports the full T1 (Cork) encoding.
\item Allows fonts to be generated in an arbitrary encoding, with
   arbitrary `fake' characters---for example the `ij' character can be
   faked if necessary by putting an `i' next to a `j'.
\item Allows caps and small caps fonts with letter spacing and kerning.
\item Allows kerning to be shared between characters, for example `ij'
   can be kerned on the left as if it were an `i' and on the right as if
   it were a `j'.  This is useful, since many PostScript fonts only
   include kerning information for characters without diacriticals.
\item Allows the generation of math fonts with \verb|nextlarger|,
   \verb|varchar|, and arbitrary font dimensions.
\item Allows more than one PostScript font to contribute to a \TeX\ font,
   for example the `ffi' ligatures for a font can be taken from the
   Expert encoding, if you have it.
\item Automatically generates a \verb|fd| file for use with version~2 of
   the New Font Selection Scheme.
\item Can be customized by the user to deal with arbitrary font encodings.

The main difference between this release and version 0.19 is the font
installer's interface, which is a huge improvement, IMHO.  It
shouldn't be long before fontinst becomes a useful tool rather than a
TeX-hackers toy!

If you'd like to be an alpha-tester, please send me some email, and
I'll send you release 1.13.  I'm afraid our ftp server is still
suffering from being `upgraded' to Solaris 2.2, so I can't make it
available for anonymous ftp.

Cheers,

Alan.

Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +44 273 606755 x 3238         alanje@cogs.susx.ac.uk
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, Sussex Univ., Brighton BN1 9QH, UK