On 9-2-2011 5:09, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
While I certainly in the end want to use the (virtual) fonts also with LaTeX I don't want to define them in a LaTeX-specific way. A standard virtual font (tfm + vf) can be used with latex, plain and context with an identical syntax so why should this be different for this new type of virtual font only because they are based on lua-code?
The you can put them under tex/fonts/generic i suppose; but even then, there is no reason to assume that context or latex provides additional lua code in the engine that is used in such a font.
Also if a font is defective (e.g. wrong kerning, missing glyphs, faulty glyph names, missing open type features ...) a virtual font which improves this font should be useful for all formats which can use it, so I don't think that a format specific location is sensible.
We have a different machinery for things like that and support is integrated into context (and targets at context). Also, there is an experimental vf creation interface that will be extended.
(I must say I'm wondering a bit why problems with fonts are so seldom discussed in the context list. In the last weeks I have seen in the xetex list a discussion how to add missing glyphs to a font, a discussion about kerning flaws, discussions about bad accent placement, in another group someone missed the "m with dot" in a font, in the luatex.user list you can find a message about a problem with fea-files and kerning, and so one ... Why do context user seems to have no problems with defective fonts? Do they use a smaller set of fonts?)
I don't know. Personally I just reject a font if it's flawed esp because there are enough fonts out there that are ok. And I definitely (as context user) don't want to go along the route of using all kind of patches to fonts, because we then end up with the same mess as we have with special encodings in traditional tex. Also, in the past I've found out that one cannot rely to much on provided metrics (also because latex assume special values, as is the case in some tfm metrics) and this is why in mkii (pdftex variant) we always generated metrics a directly from afm files. The lm and gyre font projects are in fact triggered by people within the context community as a solution to all these incomplete fonts that have been used for ages. Fortunately these projects soon became generic and were adopted and supported by latex as well. (In context we switched immediately to them.) I'm glad that we got rid of the font mess and would like to keep it that way. If a font is bugged ... preferably fix the font. (We currently impose a few runtime fixes to e.g. cambria but I'd expect that to be a temporary thing.) Don't get me wrong, context users can do a lot of tweaking if they want, which can be seen from questions on the list with respect to layout, but maybe they don't want to create a dependency on tweaks in fonts. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------