Virtual fonts provide a means of collecting bits and pieces together to make the glyphs of a font: the bits and pieces may be glyphs from “other” fonts, rules and other “basic” typesetting commands, and the positioning information that specifies how everything comes together.
An early instance of something like virtual fonts for TeX was implemented by David Fuchs to use an unusual printer. However, for practical purposes for the rest of us, virtual fonts date from when Knuth specified a format and wrote some support software, in 1989 (he published an article in TUGboat at the time; plain text copy on CTAN).
Virtual fonts provide a way of telling TeX about something more complicated than just a one-to-one character mapping. TeX reads a TFM file of the font, just as before, but the DVI processor will read the VF and use its content to specify how each glyph is to be processed.
The virtual font may contain commands:
In practice, the most common use of virtual fonts is to remap Adobe Type 1 fonts (see font metrics), though there has also been useful useful work building “fake” maths fonts (by bundling glyphs from several fonts into a single virtual font). Virtual Computer Modern fonts, making a Cork encoded font from Knuth's originals by using remapping and fragments of DVI for single-glyph “accented characters”, were the first “Type 1 format” Cork-encoded Computer Modern fonts available.
Virtual fonts are normally created in a single ASCII VPL
(Virtual Property List) file, which includes two sets of information.
The vptovf utility will use the VPL file to create
the binary TFM and VF files.
A “how-to” document, explaining how to generate a VPL,
describes the endless hours of fun that may be had, doing the job by
hand. Despite the pleasures to be had, the commonest way (nowadays)
of generating an VPL file is to use the fontinst package, which
is described in more detail together with the discussion of
PostScript font metrics.
Qdtexvpl is another utility for creating ad-hoc virtual
fonts (it uses TeX to parse a description of the virtual font, and
qdtexvpl itself processes the resulting DVI file).
Sources: