Thomas A.Schmitz said this at Sun, 27 Feb 2005 08:57:36 +0100:
I looked into it, and it turns out that Apple (?) has given new names even to quite "normal" characters - eacute becomes e_acute etc. So if you want to produce a tfm for that font, you have to invent a specific encoding vector. Once you know how this works, it's easy enough, but really annoying.
Indeed, that's one of the reasons why I came up with the unicode ("symbol"[1]) scripts... there are common utilities (ttx and Apple's ftx suite) that work well at associating canonical characters with glyph names specific to a font. I'm sure some enterprising XSLT hacker could take my scripts as a starting point and make them work with specific TeXy encodings, not just individual Unicode vectors.
So, the "variant" scheme in texfont is at least a convenient way to cope with this mess.
Well, it's the simplest of hacks to help *manage* the mess. And it's not really new--the concept of "variant" is all over Karl Berry's Fontname conventions. This just makes it a bit more user-friendly. [1] Which is to say that ttx2enc.xsl got its first public airing in http://homepage.mac.com/atl/tex/symb-uni.zip, in the context of "Unicode Symbols", but there's nothing inherent to symbols there--it's all about Unicode in general. Cheers, adam -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept. atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk Lancaster University, InfoLab21 +44(0)1524/510.514 Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK Fax:+44(0)1524/510.492 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-