Christopher Adams skrev:
Hello all,
I am curious about the feasibility of installing Multiple Master Fonts with
fontinst for use in pdfLaTeX, in particular to make variants available for
font expansion by the microtype package.
I can't see that the fontinst side of this would be any problem at all
(i.e., no new problems arise because you need to deal with extra
widths). One might rather run into issues with the fontname scheme or
NFSS (how to name all the fonts that you want to generate?), but you
seem to have settled on solutions for those already.
I have a firm grasp of the type tools used to generate custom instances
(mmafm and mmpfb),
This is otherwise what I would consider the trickiest part (but OK, the
instructions you quote look easy enough).
and it appears straightforward to install MM instances
using the traditional {series}{shape}{size} parameters supported by fontinst
and font definition files.
What I don't see support for in fontinst is MM instances generated along the
width axis for use in font expansion.
If you're using \installfont level commands, you simply need to write
more of them (because you want to generate more fonts).
If you're using \latinfamily then you need to modify the list of widths
that this (rather dumb) command will look for. The key macro there is
\latin_widths, whose default definition is
\def\latin_widths{
\latin_width{}{}
\latin_width{n}{c}
}
The first argument of \latin_width (no plural) is the fontname width,
and the second argument is the "NFSS width" -- technically it will be
the second half of the NFSS series attribute. A trivial redefinition to
also do +5, +10, -5, and -10 width variants would be
\def\latin_widths{
\latin_width{}{}
\latin_width{+5}{+5}
\latin_width{+10}{+10}
\latin_width{-5}{-5}
\latin_width{-10}{-10}
\latin_width{n}{c}
\latin_width{n+5}{c+5}
\latin_width{n+10}{c+10}
\latin_width{n-5}{c-5}
\latin_width{n-10}{c-10}
}
Following the example that Hàn Thế Thành gives in his Font Expansion with
pdfTeX article, instances meant for use in font expansion have a +5, +10,
etc. appended to the font name. Thus, Minion MM Roman at 12 points with 2
percent expansion is named pmnr8a12+20.pfb.
If you care about sizes, then you need to work at the \installfont
level, since \latinfamily only does "one font for all sizes" declarations.
Can fontinst be used to install these MM instances for use in font
expansion?
Yes, as shown above. The only thing I can think of that might be
potentially problematic is that the above generates NFSS declarations
for all the font widths: there's an m series, a b series, an m+5
series, a b+5 series, an m+10 series, and so on. As long as one doesn't
select any font from those extra series explicitly however, I don't
think they do anything besides taking up a bit of main and string
memory, which are usually not in short supply.
Lars Hellström
