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, nor automatically search for files 
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.


* Documentation

The doc directory contains pure documentation; in 
particular the doc/manual directory should be of 
interest, as it contains the fontinst manual. For all 
questions about how one uses fontinst, see this manual.

Sadly, the manual has not been updated since fontinst v1.8, 
which means the features that are new with fontinst v1.9 
are not covered by it. The literate source (in particular 
its "Usage" part) does however describe those quite 
thoroughly; this material can be found in the source 
directory. See in particular source/fisource.tex.

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.


* 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


14 July 2003,
Lars Hellstr\"om
