Re: Guidelines for bounding boxes?

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 4:27 AM, Werner LEMBERG<address@hidden> wrote:
>
>>> One has to keep in mind that Metafont does not permit more than 16
>>> different heights per font (something like that, I don't remember
>>> the exact details).
>>
>> Yes, this problem already bites us.  I'll add a bug tracker item
>> which suggests to split the Metafont output into even smaller units,
>> say, 16 glyphs per subfont, to circumvent the problem.  It's
>> basically a logistic change which can be done even with minimal
>> knowledge of the Metafont language -- perhaps this is something for a
>> frog?
>
> This is red herring.  The metrics for feta are computed by parsing the
> metafont .log file.  The .TFM files are unused, because of the limits
> on different sizes, and because it does not support no negative width.

Oh.  Any idea where to document this prominently enough that people stop
worrying about it?

If the TFM are really unused, then the font setup should likely include

fontmaking := 0;

after mode_setup.  In that case, no TFM file is produced at all,
probably reducing the possible confusion.  With some luck, the warnings
go away as well, but I have not tried this myself and am to lazy to
check the metafont source.

-- 
David Kastrup