[texhax] ?encoding? suffices in the TeX Live Adobe font TFMs

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 20 October 2009 Philip TAYLOR wrote:

 > Many thanks for the information, Reinhard : very helpful.
 > But one thing confuses me : when you write
 > 
 >  > I don't know what you intend, b  ut if you change the font encoding, you
 >  > almost always have to create a new tfm file.  At least unless you are
 >  > talking about monospaced fonts.
 > 
 > I thought (but it is a long time since I played with
 > such things) that all I would need to do was to create
 > a VP file (virtual property list) specifying one
 > or more base fonts and the necessary mappings, and
 > then convert this to a VF.  Have I misunderstood
 > (or mis-remembered) this ?

Hi Phil,
please excuse the late response, I had, and still have, some problems
with my computer.

It's good that you are familiar with plain TeX and TeX primitives.
LaTeX and Context provide convenient user interfaces but these are
only wrappers.  Let's ignore them ATM.

The only way to specify a font in plain TeX is to specify the name of
the .tfm file:

   \font\rm=cmr10

   (means: load cmr10.tfm) 

This means that each real or virtual font needs its own .tfm file.
It's not sufficient to create a new virtual font.  You have to create
a new .tfm file too, otherwise the virtual font won't be accessible. 

Regards,
  Reinhard

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