Re: 8r fonts

[Alan Jeffrey <alanje@cogs.susx.ac.uk>]

 > PERL would be a much better tool to handle all the PS
 > font stuff. And it is not too late to rewrite fontinst into PERL.

Ho ho ho, very droll...  Yes, perl would have been a better language
to start off with (in fact some of the postprocessing of fontinst
fonts is done with perl) but I think it's too late to port fontinst.
You could do it if you were prepared to change the syntax of .mtx and
.etx files, but as it stands they are very TeX-specific, and writing a
perl parser for them would be tantamount to writing a TeX-mouth
interpreter in perl.

If I were doing it all again I'd do it differently, but these days I
tend to have a `not (very) broken so don't fix it (much)' feeling
about fontinst.

Alan.