🚀 go-pugleaf

I am trying to create a virtual font which will mimic the style of 
Manutius's editions of the classic poets. These use italic as the main 
body face. However, for capitals (e.g. at the beginnings of lines) he 
uses roman letters. And not just romans, but romans just a bit 
shorter than a lower case i.

So I create a virtual font, starting off with the VPL for the italic
font, 
and declaring an additional font (say FONT 1) with the roman shapes. I
use 
FONTAT to reduce the size. So I end up with something like this: 

(MAPFONT D 1 (FONTNAME myromanfont) (FONTAT D 800))

Then I cut the CHARACTER declarations from the roman VPL file and 
paste them into the new file, replacing the declarations for the 
italic capitals. I add to each declaration, after the properties 
giving the character dimensions, a command to set the 
character, something like this:

(CHARACTER C G (CHARWD ...) ... (MAP (SELECTFONT D 1) (SETCHAR C G)))

The result approaches close to what I want. I get the roman character at 
the appropriate size; however, the character bounding box has the 
dimensions of the unscaled roman character. That is, the dimensions 
(CHARWD, CHARHT, CHARDP, CHARIC) have not been reduced, only the actual, 
printed size of the character. As a result, a large gap appears between 
each roman capital and the following character. 

Now of course I could reduce the dimensions explicitly. Besides being a 
pain, this would obstruct easy alterations to the ratio between the 
italic and roman characters. 

What do I do?

Tim Larkin
Federal Nutrition Laboratory
Tower Road
Ithaca, New York
tsl1@cornell.edu
607-255-7008