Hello Hans,
And the argument about being too LaTeXy: the encoding of these files is not LaTeX specific (besides from the fact that LaTeX can only handle T1/OT1 encoding right), so what is not generic about them?
if you run afm2tfm on some files you get different results that the handcrafted' ones that come with distributions; (afm2pl for instance defaults to different metrics [esp spacing] than afm2tfm); many of these things are not really documented and done by people who use latex and know about latex internals (for instance how they deal with spacing); concerning generic ...
Yes, but you stated that "different metrics, different subpaths, urw instances either or not present". Different metrics? I can't see any differences in metrics between differnent distributions on those fonts! Can you? They come from one source, i.e psnfss. Different subpaths? Perhaps, but what is the problem? Kpathsea is taking care of this. URW or not to URW? Good question, lets get started on this subject :-)) If we accept that there is such thing as "psnfss", which is preinstalled on almost all TeX systems out there, we can let the user decide: use "psnfss-metrics" or the ones generated by $TOOL. And I can't see any problems with the spacing with those fonts being too LaTeX related. We should be happy about those fonts, since we get good fonts (in terms of encodings/spacing/finetuning) for free from the LaTeX side. You are right that there are many other things being to LaTeX related. The situation is getting much better. A few years ago the distributions only knew about LaTeX. I had major problems with old tetex (memory problems for example), now most things work out of the box. [...]
latex commands in entries) concerning fonts: if you want texnansi encoding, there are in most cases no tfm files etc. They are mentioned here and there, but often not on the system. It took me a while to find out that -because of that- i could not use precoockes metrics at all -)
Who needs texnansi anyway? (OK, perhaps there are few who really need texnansi :-), but we might aks Mr. psnfss to generate texnansi metrics as well). [...] Patrick -- ConTeXt wiki: http://contextgarden.net texshow-web: http://texshow.contextgarden.net List archive: http://archive.contextgarden.net