Help please: How to get lining numerals into my small caps font.

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Alan Vlach wrote:
> 
> Hello:
> 
> This is a low-level irritation about which I have posted one or two
> queries over the last few months:  I have a commercially-purchased set
> of Sabon fonts which I like very much, but the small caps and oldstyle
> figures are in the same file, so fontinst generates a font psbrc8t with
> non-lining numerals in the numeral slots '060 through '071.  I want to
> put _lining_ numerals there.

This requires renaming the characters which have a faulty name assigned.
Either you do that explicitely in the AFM (the hard way) or have a
version of scripts/fontinst which can cope without doing so explicitely.

> Here's what I've tried so far:
> 
> + Downloaded vfinst, ran the scripts on my psb/afm files, and got small
> caps and non-lining numerals in _all_ my psb/m/* fonts -- very
> unsatisfactory (and disappointing), so I restored what I had produced
> from fontinst.

Somehow the result shows that people are right who recommend that using
fontinst commands is the more reliable choice. Don't believe the ads ;-)
 
> + Downloaded the sabon package from CTAN (fonts/psfonts/adobe/sabon) and
> replaced psbrc8t.tfm and psbrc8t.vf.  This got the numerals right, but
> the small caps are faked.  I'd prefer to use the _real_ small caps I
> paid for.

The packages are kind of minimal variants - either for demo or people
who think it is not essential to do more.
Be patient and keep in mind that producing metrics for all Adobe fonts
is a quite quite different approach to a specific setup for using
features of a single font package.

> This seems like an easy problem to solve and shouldn't have taken me the
> hours I've spent so far.  I am not looking for another full-scale
> implementation of Sabon (no Y&Y commercials, please) or anything more
> than just the answer to this specific question.  Maybe it's in the
> fontinst documentation, but I don't understand the syntax of fontinst
> commands, so the docs don't make that much sense to me.

Well, understanding fontinst basics is a requirement to make full use of
font capabilities.
 
> So ... if anyone knows how, please tell me how to put lining numerals in
> positions '060 through '071 of my psbrc8t font.

Get the character naming in the AFM files correct.

Hilmar Schlegel