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
