Faking ff ligatures

[Thierry Bouche]

> \movert{\neg{\scale{\width{f}}{250}}}

This _is_ absolutely insane.

Don't mismatch `faking' the ligature ff, which is an impossible task
(if it was possible, the whole ligature business would have vanished
in occidental typography, don't you believe?), and filling-in the ff
slot in O/T1 encodings for (??) compatibility or strict
compliance. What fontinst does is rather perverse: use tex's
auto-ligaturing mechanism + VPL power to automagically replace the
string ff by ... the same string exactly how it would have been printed
without the TeX+VF power! 

Now mileage does vary among foundries about how the string ff should
look like when no actual ligature is available. For instance, Adobe
makes its best to fake an horrible fi ligature by kerning a lot that
pair. On the other hand, URW is very sane in considering that
legibility requires to add space between those two glyphs (compare ptm
& utm, e.g.).

Anyway, you can't programmatically find a generic kerning that would
fake a reasonnable ligature, fontinst's complex way of doing nothing
is the only sane line here.

Thierry Bouche, Grenoble.