playing with Centaurs

[Lars Hellström]

At 22.06 +0200 2002-09-14, Fernando Q. Gouvea wrote:
>I'm trying to play with the Centaur fonts (with Expert fonts and
>alternates) and thereby to teach myself the details of fontinst.
>
>So, some (perhaps naive) questions:
>
>1) Several times I've gotten errors because there is no "x" glyph in the
>font. I think this happens when latin.mtx calls
>
>\setint{xheight}{\height{x}}

latin.mtx should do such tests as

\ifisglyph{x}\then
   \setint{xheight}{\height{x}}
\else
   \setint{xheight}{431} % Default from Computer Modern
\fi

(or perhaps check a few more glyphs before using the default) but it is
quite possible that it currently doesn't.

>
>There must be a workaround...
>

Make sure yourself that xheight is set to a valid value before latin.mtx is
called.

>2) One of the Centaur fonts is a swash italic, most of whose characters
>are called things like "Aswash"... but not all of them! It also includes
>a "ct" ligature and other such things. I would like to set it up as a
>separate font, so that I can then define a macro \swash{A} to call Aswash
>or even \ctlig to use a ct ligature. How do I do this?

This sounds like the kind of question that is answered by the LaTeX
fntguide.tex document.

Note however that since TeX doesn't automatically insert any kerning
between characters from different fonts, it is perhaps better to make a
separate font where the upper case is the swash capitals, and where ct is
replaced by the ct ligature. It is more on that side of things that
fontinst becomes really useful.

>3) Centaur has four alternate fonts (roman, bold, italic, bolditalic) each
>of which contain only a few characters. Perhaps the best way to use these
>is to create alternate versions of the full fonts that use the same
>characters everywhere except in those slots. But this too seems to require
>an alternate encoding, to call "Qalternate" instead of "Q". (The
>characters are inconsistently named: Qalternate, but Qsmallalt...)

At least you'll have to use a different ETX file. Assuming that Centaur =
mur in the Berry scheme, a good idea might be to make a copy of t1.etx
which you call t1a-mur.etx (or something like that) and change the glyph
names there as needed. Clever redefinitions of \uc and \lc might help
reduce editing, but need not be sufficient. The inconsistency you mention
probably means that you cannot simply let t1ac-mur.etx (for smallcaps) be a
copy of t1c.etx that calls t1a-mur.etx instead of t1.etx, but has to make
another full copy of the t1 encoding vector.

Also note that the LaTeX encoding in \installfont should be T1 even if the
ETX-file argument is t1a-mur or t1ac-mur.

Lars Hellström