[Fontinst] Latin Modern fonts: small caps and accents

cfrees at imapmail.org cfrees at imapmail.org
Sun May 23 16:07:39 CEST 2010


On Sat 22nd May, 2010 at 00:11, cfrees at imapmail.org seems to have written:

> On Fri 21st May, 2010 at 17:59, Lars Hellström seems to have written:
>
>> Dr. Clea F. Rees skrev:
>>> I am trying to update CFRLatinModern for version 2.004 of Latin Modern
>>> (included in TL 2009 which I recently updated to). While I'm at it, I
>>> was hoping to resolve some of the issues which I or others raised about
>>> the earlier version of the package. (The aim of the package is to make
>>> various features of the fonts, especially different styles of figures,
>>> easily accessible in LaTeX.)
>>> 
>>> The following is bugging me a lot: when using the small-caps version of
>>> the font, accent placement for characters which  must be created "on
>>> the fly" are wrong. Not only are the accents too low for the small-caps
>>> themselves, they are too low for the capital letters as well. So if I'm
>>> using T1 encoding, \^A is fine but \^W and \^Y are not; similarly for
>>> \^a versus \^w and \^y.
>>> 
>>> I don't expect these characters to look great because TeX is creating
>>> them on the fly, but my package creates output markedly worse than that
>>> produced by using lmodern itself and I cannot figure out why. The
>>> accents are placed much lower so they run into the letter below.
>>> 
>>> This isn't a problem for the non-small-caps variants of the fonts - the
>>> output produced by my package doesn't look any worse than that output
>>> by lmodern for these characters.
>>> 
>>> I did notice that fontdimen 10 and 12 differ in lmr10.afm and
>> 
>> Numbered fontdimens in AFMs? News to me, unless you mean AFM keywords 
>> corresponding to acccapheight and maxheight.
>> 
> Probably I'm explaining badly. There are a bunch of lines starting:
> Comment TFM fontdimen <number>: <number> (text)
>
>>> lmcsc10.afm. These are both smaller in the case of lmcsc10.afm which
>>> seems odd. But I'm assuming this is just my ignorance since lmodern is
>>> obviously based on these dimensions and everything works fine there.
>> 
>> One fontdimen that is likely to be important is xheight (fontdimen 5), as 
>> TeX's \accent primitive assumes the accent character specified is in the 
>> proper position for a glyph with \height{}=xheight. If for example the 
>> smallcaps xheight is larger than the regular xheight, but you're using the 
>> regular accent in the smallcaps font, then you would get the effect that it 
>> is placed too low.
>
> grep XHeight lmr10.afm lmcsc10.afm gives:
>
> lmr10.afm:XHeight 430.55556
> lmcsc10.afm:XHeight 513.88889
>
> grep xheight lmr10.afm lmcsc10.afm gives:
>
> lmr10.afm:Comment TFM fontdimen  5: 4.3055	(xheight)
> lmcsc10.afm:Comment TFM fontdimen  5: 4.3055     (xheight)
>
> So would fontinst be using the first or the second?

Regarding fontdimen 12 (which I think is "max height" based on the
afm), the dimension is smaller in lmcsc10.afm than in lmr10.afm but
larger in ec-lmcsc10.tfm than in ec-lmr10.tfm:

lmr10.afm:Comment TFM fontdimen 12: 11.27      (non-standard: max
height)
lmcsc10.afm:Comment TFM fontdimen 12: 11         (non-standard: max
height)

ec-lmr10.tfm:    (PARAMETER D 12 R 0.932001)
ec-lmcsc10.tfm:   (PARAMETER D 12 R 0.933001)

On the other hand, when I use fontinst to generate tfms, I end up with
this dimension being larger for lmr10 than lmcsc10:

clmr8t10.pl:   (PARAMETER D 12 R 1.127)
clmcsc8t10.pl:   (PARAMETER D 12 R 1.1)

All of which leaves me suspecting that I really don't understand even
the bits of this I previously thought I did understand. The
relationship between the afms and tfms when I generate the tfms using
fontinst makes sense to me, but how do the dimensions end up not only
differing in the tfms included with Latin Modern but actually reversing
relationships such as "greater than" and "less than"?!

I assumed that the tfms provided in Latin Modern would be derived from
the afms but now I'm wondering if that's so...

Thanks very much!
- cfr

> I'm using the smallcaps accent in the smallcaps font; the regular
> accent in the regular font. I don't think I'm inadvertently mixing them.
>
> Thanks!
>
> - cfr
>
>> Lars Hellström
>> 
>>> I'm using fontinst to generate the font files needed from the relevant
>>> afms. Because this takes a very long time to complete on my machine,
>>> I don't really want to do this by trial-and-error alone. Besides, I
>>> have no idea what to try - am definitely out of my depth.
>>> 
>>> Any help will be greatly appreciated. My package works OK for English
>>> but it really looks bad for Welsh...
>>> 
>>> - cfr
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>


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