Are Virtual Fonts Obsolete?

Virtual fonts (VF) were created to address a shortcoming of TEX fonts: each slot address occupied exactly one byte, so there were no more than 256 different characters per font. Later, when PostScript fonts got popular, VF became the way of choice for integration of these fonts with TEX. Today new font formats can be directly read by the modern TEX engines, and, for example, X E TEX can directly work with system fonts. There is a temptation to declare VF obsolete. In this paper we show that there is much more in VF than just making PostScript fonts available for TEX. There are various tricks developed over the years that use VF technology to achieve new striking effects. The aim of this paper is to convince the users to learn how to employ VF, and to convince the programmers of the new engines to provide the interface for font manipulation comparable to VF.