README for fontinst * What is it? Fontinst is a program that helps with installing fonts for (La)TeX. Since it is written entirely in TeX macros, it is completely portable. More precisely, fontinst helps mainly with the number crunching and shoveling parts of font installation. This means in practice that it creates a number of files which give the TeX metrics (and related information) for a font family that (La)TeX needs to do any typesetting in these fonts. Fontinst furthermore makes it easy to create fonts containing glyphs from more than one base font, taking advantage of e.g. "expert" font sets. Fontinst cannot examine files to see if they contain any useful information or work with binary file formats; those tasks must normally be done manually or with the help of some other tool, such as the pltotf and vptovf programs. Nor can fontinst automatically search for files, but if they are named according to the fontname scheme (Berry) then fontinst sometimes succeeds very well in guessing what the interesting files are called. * Documentation The doc directory contains pure documentation; in particular the doc/manual directory should be of interest, as it contains the fontinst manual. For questions about the meaning of fontinst commands, see this manual. The manual is however not a tutorial on how to use fontinst. Some alternative sources of information that you may find useful are: * Philipp Lehman's "The Font Installation Guide" Available on CTAN, at info/Type1fonts/fontinstallationguide/ * intro98.tex - parts of the 1998 fontinst v1.8 manual that were split off during the v1.9 revision. These are much more tutorial in style, although not entirely modern. * The fontinst mailing list and its archives (See below for relevant addresses.) * The fontinst Literate Programming sources (see source/fisource.dvi). If a command isn't documented anywhere else, there is probably a discussion of it in the sources. They're thoroughly indexed. The examples directory contains some examples (with comments) of using fontinst to install a font family. * Installation To use fontinst, you only need to make sure the inputs directory and its subdirectories are on TeX's input path. Usually you do this by moving it to a suitable location. In a TDS texmf tree, the inputs directory is usually made the ${TEXMF}/tex/fontinst directory. You will probably also want to move the file fontdoc.sty in the latex directory to some location where TeX will find it. Many of the .mtx and .etx files in the inputs hierarchy are simultaneously fontinst input files and LaTeX documents; the fontdoc package is needed to typeset them as the latter. In a TDS texmf tree, the normal place for fontdoc.sty is in the tex/latex/misc directory. Also recall that some TeX implementations maintain a database over files that have been installed. If you've placed fontinst in a suitable place but TeX complains it cannot find the file fontinst.sty then the problem may be that you need to update this database of files. That is however nothing that is particular for fontinst. * Latin and other scripts The fontinst distribution includes the necessary encoding definition (.etx) files for the latin script as used in European languages, but there is nothing in fontinst as a program that restricts it to these languages. In the T2 bundle (CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/t2) there are corresponding fontinst files for the cyrillic scripts (and in the future it might become part of the main fontinst distribution). * The test directory This is mainly of interest for advanced fontinst users. It collects some files that were written to test the new features in various versions of fontinst. * Mailing list Questions and bug reports should be sent to the fontinst mailing list fontinst@tug.org General information about the mailing list is at: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/fontinst 22 August 2009, Lars Hellstr\"om