Re: Round-off errors in metrics & fontinst/finst status...

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

Sebastian Rahtz writes:
> I am not working on fontinst; I dont think Alan is. so i suggest you
> jump in....

I've looked at the source, and, well, I really don't want to touch it.

TeX is a typesetting system. It may be Turing-complete, but I really
would rather write such things in a language well suited to processing
text files, working with real numbers and storing things in data
structures. Perl 5 seems like the right choice, and it's more-or-less
as cross-platform as TeX. Maybe I can use Yannis Haralambous's code as
a starting point..?

I'm still debating whether I really want to do this; I'm not sure that
I'd want to replace all of fontinst -- it's a pretty clever beast --
but I might just write something that does everything I need of it
(i.e., expert sets, old style digits, multiple-master fonts) and does
it accurately. (I was further demoralized tonight to discover that
afm2tfm just silently truncates decimals in AFM files too.)

Let me know if this seems like a foolhardy or worthy endeavour...

    Melissa.

P.S. Just why *am* I writing e-mail about TeX fonts at 4am?

P.P.S. Rowland may notice from my spelling of `endeavour' that I'm really
English, but that doesn't mean I'm going to spell `font' `fount'; the
best I'll do is sometimes spell it `typeface'. ;o)