[pdftex] Font encoding/conversion help desperately needed

[Gerben Wierda]

On Monday, Jan 6, 2003, at 13:25 Europe/Amsterdam, Siep wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Jan 2003 01:21:38 +0100
> Gerben Wierda <Sherlock at rna.nl> wrote:
>
>> I am trying to create an automatic conversion of TrueType fonts on
>> my Mac OS X system to something usable by TeX. I have decided that
>> ttf2tex is not an option, as it only produces a way to embed TTF in
>> pdfTeX (and pdfTeX also does not supports slanted TTF, so it is
>> incomplete too), but ttf2tex is not compatible with dvips and I
>> want to support that too. Besides, ttf2tex only supports T1
>> encoding and it would be nice to support both T1 and OT1. So, I
>> need another route.
>>
>> I have used fondu to convert Apple's fonts to separate ttf files. I
>>
>> have followed ttf2tex's naming convention, e.g. for GillSans:
>>
>>          GillSansLight.ttf       ,       mgsl16.ttf
>>          GillSansLightItalic.ttf ,       mgsli16.ttf
>>          GillSans.ttf            ,       mgsr16.ttf
>>          GillSansItalic.ttf      ,       mgsri16.ttf
>>          GillSansBold.ttf        ,       mgsb16.ttf
>>          GillSansBoldItalic.ttf  ,       mgsbi16.ttf
>>
>> I am now looking at using ttf2pt1 to convert TTF to Type1. The
>> results seem pretty good (at one point I was able to look at the
>> results, I forget what I hacked to get that working). But now I
>> need to automate a lot of work (map files for use with pdftex and
>> dvips, fd files for LaTeX, encodings?).
>>
>> fontinst looked promising. But when I run ttf2afm on my ttf files,
>> they seem not to have an encoding (all numbers are -1). Fontinst
>> seems to expect something like mgsb8a but ttf2tex says the TTF
>> stuff should be renamed to mgsb16. 8a is Adobe standard, 16 seems
>> to be Unicode. How should I handle my afm files so that fontinst
>> produces all the fd, tfm, etc?
>
> The afm-file references glyphs by name. It shouldn't matter which, if
> any, glyphs get assigned a slot, so the lack of an encoding shouldn't
> matter. I believe I did at one point use fontinst to process these
> afms.
>
> Another problem is that TrueType handles font families differently,
> which doesn't help if you want to automatically define font families
> for TeX.
>
> The best way to handle missing slanted ttfs is to define italics as a
> substitute in the fd file. I don't know whether or not fontinst will
> do that for you. Anyhow, artificial slanting is frowned upon by
> typographers.
>
> The main problem seems to me the renaming.

So what should I do in *this* case?

G