etx, mtx, texnansi, afm2pl

[Siep]

I am working on a utility afm2pl, an afm2tfm replacement,  which as
its default action produces a pl file with the original kerns and
ligatures preserved; see www.ntg.nl/afm2pl.html. It is best used with
texnansi encoding. It can also produce letterspaced fonts, with some
caveats. The package includes a .enc file for uppercased texnansi.

I would like to add fontinst inputfiles for generation of smallcaps.
However, a lot of things about fontinst are fuzzy to me. Can anybody
help out with some answers?

- The latest teTeX, from late may, contains version 1.8; TeX Live 7
contains version 1.9. Presumably, 1.8 files can still be used under
1.9, but how much extra work would it be to change to 1.9 later on?

- The role of mtx- and etx files is not at all clear to me. None of
the supplied mtx files seem to contain information for e.g. the
ellipsis character; there may be more such characters. Do I need to
replace latin.mtx with a version which covers all the glyphs in
texnansi? Or could I just make a supplementary mtx file? On the other
hand, etx files also contains font metric information, viz. default
font dimensions.  Why this duplication?

- What are raw fonts? I understand that they are used as
intermediate files. I got the impression that they are not usable
for real typesetting, even if you don't care about kerns and
ligatures. What pieces are missing?

- 8y.etx doesn't quite match texnansi.enc:
    slot 8y.etx texnansi.enc
    10   empty  cwm
    160  space  nbspace
    173  hyphen sfthyphen

Why? Can I use the 8y.etx as-is with \installfont or should I make my
own variation?

Thanks for any enlightenment.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg
siepo@cybercomm.nl