[Fontinst] latest fixes for fontinst 1.914

[Walter Schmidt]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:45:17 +0100, Lars Hellström wrote:


>Freaky! The dotaccent extends outside its bounding box! 
>Which foundry is responsible for this? 

This is the original Adobe Palatino Roman 002.000 from
FintFoolio8.  The bug does not occur when using URW's 
substitute. The bug does not occur, either, when using 
MicroPress' "clone" of the traditional Palatino font.

Hmmm....  let me think...

The TFMs and VFs are based on the AFM files as of Palatino 
version 001.005, which corresponds with the Base35 fonts.
Let's compare these with Adobe's current AFM files v002.001:
Indeed, the box of the dotaccent is different now!

Arrgh...  this means that Adobe's latest Palatino fonts 
are no longer identical with the ones from the Base35 set.
Oh my God!


>Of course, if Palatino always produces silly results for the Polish
>letters, then it is perhaps rather the font than the scripts that 
>should be considered broken.

Well, the font isn't actually broken; it just does no longer 
comply with the metrics I'm using.  But your conclusion 
is correct:  My \itopaccent macro _is_ the right way to go, 
and I'll put it back into latin.mtx.

However, what are the consequences, as far as the use of 
the Palatino fonts is concerned?  Under the assumption that 
most TeX systems are using URW's fonts anyway, we can stay 
with version 001.005 of the AFMs.  In the long run however, 
we'll have to give up the idea of "Base fonts", and PSNFSS 
needs to be fully oriented towards explicit use of the URW 
fonts.  But that's a different subject...

best wisheh
Walter