[Fontinst] Mapping all diacritics to actual glyphs rather than composites

[Christopher Adams]

Lars, thanks for your feedback.

2010/1/15 Lars Hellström <Lars.Hellstrom at residenset.net>

> Christopher Adams skrev:
>
>  I noticed that for a large number of accented characters that are defined
>> by
>> T1, in the output from pdflatex they are being drawn as composite glyphs,
>> rather than independent glyphs as they exist in the Palladio fonts.
>>
>
> Just to be clear here: By "composite" you mean that there are really two
> glyphs being combined to make up one letter?
>

That is correct.


> I first felt a bit confused when reading this, but that's probably because
> I've been thinking about Unicode lately, where (the semantic counterpart of)
> this kind of thing would be called "decomposed".


I do see the point of your terminology. So I can say that the ę is being
decomposed to e and  ̨?

 For glyphs such as *gbreve* this makes no difference in the final output.
> For others such as *eogonek,* the ogonek is misplaced*
>

Yes, getting the position of the ogonek right is tricky.


But why should it have to be? URWPalladioL comes with the glyph *eogonek*,
approved by Zapf himself I should hope. The T1 encoding has a slot for *
eogonek*. Why isn't this glyph being taken directly from the font?

For glyphs that T1 does not cover, such as *iogonek*, I understand why they
must be drawn on the fly.

 (and anyway you can't
> make a good *eogonek* by compositing; it really needs to be an independent
> glyph.). Likewise the *dcaron* and *tcaron* are wrong, because again you
> can't achieve good glyphs by compositing the base character with an
> apostrophe.
>

Still, they're not quite as bad as some other glyphs being faked, I suspect.


The purist in me does not make that distinction. ;-)


You need to use a different base font encoding, either instead of or in
> addition to, 8r. The quickest way of getting one that covers the glyphs
> you're asking about would probably be to use the T1 encoding itself; a
> variant on that trick is described in
>  http://tug.org/pipermail/fontinst/2009/001615.html
> and forth, though in that case t1cj.etx was used to gain access to
> smallcaps and oldstyle figure glyphs.


The link you suggested is in fact one that I came across in my search before
deciding to post to the list. I understood that I would have to do something
along these lines if I want to access glyphs not in the T1 encoding (like
scommaccent, for example).

What I don't understand is why A/E/a/eogonek and gbreve are not being taken
directly from the font, while, for example, iacute and acircumflex are.

 * As an aside, the ogoneks in PalladioL are really badly drawn. One aim of
> my project is to redraw these glyphs in a separate font and bring them into
> to my Palatino via fontinst.
>

Good choice. Combining the offerings of several base fonts is where fontinst
> really shines.
>

Exactly. While the base glyph outlines for Adobe Palatino and URWPalladioL
are practically indistinguishable, the former offers SC/OsF while the latter
has much better glyph coverage.

As always, thanks Lars!

—Christopher
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