[Fontinst] ugly asterisk in typewriter fonts

[Walter Schmidt]

Hi!

The CM Typewriter font has an asterisk character (*), which 
is more or less centered at the vertical symmetry axis.  This 
does, however, not hold for most other monospaced typefaces. 

I've tried Courier, Bitstream Letter Gothic, LuxiMono, Lucida 
Typewriter Serif and Lucida Typewriter Sans:  With all these 
typfaces, the asterisk is much too high to be attractive for 
typical applications, such as rendering of program code.  
Note that \textasteriskcentered is _not_ centered, either; 
obviously, the related fontinst code fails badly.

I have provided a "quick and dirty" bug fix in the attached 
mtx file.  The asterisk gets shifted downwards, by half of 
the difference between its natural height and the x-height.  
This looks good at first sight, but should be improved still:
First, the algorithm fails, if the height of the asterisk needs 
no fix at all; second, it does -- of course -- not really center 
the asterisk vertically.  Any ideas?

best wishes
Walter







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