Font installation (beta)

[texadmin@fourier.grenet.fr (Thierry Bouche)]

Hello,

As you probably know, I have been installing a large collection of fonts
(essentially equivalent to half the adobe library 2 years ago). If
psfonts.beta is meant for feedback, here is some:

- about 8r encoding: *all* the .pl files produced by fontinst's
\installrawfont command yield an error message by pltotf concerning an
inexistent ligature  '255. But the the pl file is clean, and the
resulting tfm are perfect. 

- about vptovf: did vptovf change as of the latest Knuth distribution ?
(I think it is the version I am using (teTeX 0.3.1)). vptovf used to die
when facing too many ligs/kern pairs and cleared out all of them. Now it
only omits the one it cannot handle. By the way, this problem is
specific to small caps expert fonts in T1 encoding: is there a way to
overcome it ? (for instance telling vptovf or fontinst to omit kerning
info under a certain limit).

- textcopyright is missing from 8r.sty (the only one I was willing to
use !)

- about spacing: I used only generated afm (from pfb) thus I suppose the
value of space  used by fontinst was the width of `i'. The resulting
spacing is slightly more tolerant than with the previous distribution
but still needs correction in order to work as well as dc/cm fonts (I
mean if you typeset in 11pt on a4paper you should only have to consider
exotic line-breaks with formulae or unhyphenable long words with
standard TeX/LaTeX settings: we are now nearer to this, but this is
still not the case). The problem is that if you loosen TeX settings,
paragraph typeset with dc fonts look bad, thus in my opinion, the
postscript fonts should be nearer to the metafont ones.

   Thierry Bouche.              (Math\'ematiques, Institut Fourier, Grenoble)
   bouche@fourier.grenet.fr   --   (BP. 74 F-38402 St-Martin d'H\`eres Cedex)
     aka texadmin@fourier.grenet.fr  as a local TeXnician