[texhax] Baskervald no spaces...

[bnb at ams.org]

re the baskervald font,

    [...] the resultant .dvi file has no spaces between
    words and, apparently, no kerning either... it all comes out as one big glop,
    even on the most minimal test, under plain TeX on the 2012 TeXlive system.
    [...]

    I tried generating pk-files by hand to see if that made a difference.
    It did not.  Clearly, there's a step I'm missing in preparing the font
    for use.  [...]

sounds to me like you haven't got all the
necessary fontdimens filled in in the .tfm
file.

there is no "space" character in a tex
font if you're using .tfm and .pk files
rather than system fonts (a la xetex; i'm
not sure where spaces come from with that
implementation).  spaces are inserted as
horizontal movement as controlled by the
fontdimens.

there's a "human-readable" equivalent of the
tfm file -- a "property list".  conversion
back and forth is accomplished by two
programs that should be delivered with a
tex distribution: tftopl and pltotf.  the
cm values for the relevant fontdimens are
described in the texbook, app.f, p.433.
you'll obviously want to adjust these to be
suitable for the baskervald font, but using
cmr10 as a model should put you on the right
track.

not really difficult, just tedious.
good luck.
						-- bb