WNRI fonts for CSX transcription in TeX

[Thomas B. Ridgeway]

A correspondant inquires about which metafont files to use in order
to run TeX with the CSX-based wnri fonts available on 
blackbox.hacc.washington.edu for testing and feedback.  In that my response
sheds a tiny bit of light on the future of the wnri fonts, I burden
all of your mailboxes with it.

[If you are new to this list, CSX is the proposed Classical Sanskrit
Extended encoding for characters useful in romanized transcription
of indic languages]

Response:
  You can use any wnri* font which is there: all the other files ending in .mf
or .map are needed in the metafont run to produce the wnri* fonts, and the
normal complement of standard *.mf files present in a complete metafont system
(e.g. cmbase.mf) is also assumed.  So use wnri*.*, but ftp everything ending in
mf or map.
The nameing scheme for the fonts is
wnriXY ==
   Washington Romanized Indic X Y point
      where X is r=roman, b=bold, i=italic, bi=bold italic, and
            in the fullness of time s (or h or g)=sanserif and t=typewriter
      and   Y is 8 or 10, possibly eventually 5, 7, 12, 17 etc., but
            I am not entirely convinced of the utility of supporting
            the entire range of sizes, rather than just relying on
            magnifications.

   The layout of the wnri fonts follows CSX directly insofar as the CSX
standard is accomodating indic transcription rather than merely cloning
the IBM-PC extended character set.  The next trial balloon of wnri (which
will probably be along sometime in spring when I have gotten over a little
end-of-bienniel-budget-cycle administrative nonsense here) will support 
a slightly expanded character set with more useful east-of-suez characters: 
the forms specific to CSX will stay the same, of course.  
[If you use non-indic characters such as #156 'pound sterling sign' 
you will be confounded by a future version of wnri which puts upper-case 
E-macron (equivalent to TeX's \=E ) in position 156, o-macron in 157 
instead of 'Yen sign', O-macron in 158 instead of 'Peseta' and so forth.

To TeX a file with the screen-font visible characters in use, just say 
something like \font\indicr=wnrir10  % make the CSX fonts known to TeX
               \font\indici=wnrii10 % bold
               \font\indicb=wnrib10 % italic
               \indicr             % make indic the current font
If it seems necessary, one can redefine \bf \it and \rm to accomodate
existing sets of macros or whatever; beyond this point people use TeX in
such different ways that I hesitate to go much further.  In versions of
TeX from 3 on, the characters with values greater than 127 are regarded as
some kind of non-numeric non alphabetic printable stuff that TeX should
just set in type and not worry about, so no action is needed to let the
characters print.  The letter forms in wnri* have all diacritics composed
in advance, so no further accent operations are needed (indeed, more accenting
may not even be possible as in some cases wnri characters lie about how tall
they are so as to prevent baseline spreading).

cheers,
Tom