Re: What's the relationship between vfs and tfms?

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

   B> Agreed.  But that still doesn't address the question of why yet
   B> another layer of remapping is needed (VF).

   Well, it allows you to do stuff like mathptm, which I did last night
   for the Spectrum font.  I've also heard that it allows you to do
   proper kerning for ligatures in the expert set?

Yes, VF lets you do some neat tricks like combining characters from
different fonts into one `font' and tweaking side-bearings and advance
widths, etc.  Which is very good if you don't have tools to work with
the actual fonts, or don't want to touch the actual fonts.  But this
isn't what we seem to be talking about here, which is straight-forward
use of text fonts in LaTeX 2e.  My point is that in order to get the
rarely used fancy features we seem to force complexity in the trivial
case.  I have nothing against doing the fancy stuff, just don't like
the idea of doing it at the expense of making ordinary things complex
for the average users.

Berthold.