fontinst with 8y.etx

[Ulrik Vieth <vieth@thphy.uni-duesseldorf.de>]

[ I suppose Rowland won't be too happy to hear about this, but at the
risk of being flamed I'll push it out anyway. ]

Question: What happens if you write an 8y.etx, i.e. LY1 encoding file
(largely based on 8r.etx), copy of the 8r.mtx metrics file to 8y.mtx,
use a fontinst.rc file consisting of

  % fontinst.rc
  \def\raw_encoding{8y}

and run fontinst's \latinfamily{<fam><variant>} as usual?

Answer: It works perfectly.  fontinst runs happily and does everything
it would normally do, except that it will use 8y instead of 8r fonts.
In particular, for every 8a-encoded AFM file it will do a ligfull
installation of an 8y-reeencoded `raw' font, which implies writing an
8y<fam>.fd file.  For every such raw font, it will also generate a set
of virtual fonts for the 7t (OT1), 8t (T1) and 8c (TS1) encodings,
including all the fakery of non-existing glyphs you are accustomed to
find in virtual fonts generated on the basis of 8r-encoded raw fonts.

Furthermore, if you call for an expertized or oldstyle installation,
it'll happily combine glyphs from 8y-encoded raw fonts and 8x-encoded
expert fonts, just as it would normally do for 8r and 8x.

Does this sound like an interesting approach that might suitable to
convince skeptics?  Since fontinst will generate 8y<fam>.fd files,
you could use them for typesetting with LY1 directly, or you could
equally well use OT1, T1 and TS1 instead.

As far as I can see, using 8y (a.k.a. TeXnANSI or LY1) instead of 8r
(a.k.a. TeXBase1) is absolutely equivalent from the point of view of
fontinst.  All it would take is a single line of code in fontinst.rc,
as indicated above.  The situation is more complicated, however, when
it comes to Sebastian's famtool.pl front-end to fontinst, which is
unfortuantely littered with all sorts of explicit references to 8r
instead of referencing a variable for the $raw_encoding.

What do you think?  I suppose I'll just include my 8y.etx and a
slightly touched-up 8r.etx with fontinst-1.8 and leave it to you
to decide which one you want to use.

Cheers, Ulrik.