TeX macros for converting Adobe Font Metric files to TeX metric and virtual font format. Fontinst helps mainly with the number crunching and shovelling parts of font installation. This means in practice that it creates a number of files which give the TeX metrics (and related information) for a font family that (La)TeX needs to do any typesetting in these fonts. Fontinst furthermore makes it easy to create fonts containing glyphs from more than one base font, taking advantage of (e.g.) "expert" font sets.

Fontinst cannot examine files to see if they contain any useful information, nor automatically search for files or work with binary file formats; those tasks must normally be done manually or with the help of some other tool, such as the pltotf and vptovf programs.