[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] XeTeX 0.4 available

Bruno Voisin bruno.voisin at hmg.inpg.fr
Wed Apr 21 15:38:16 CEST 2004


Le 21 avr. 04, à 15:11, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> [snip]
>
> Hope this helps clarify what's happening, and what the restrictions 
> are at the moment. Support for TFM-based typesetting was not a 
> priority in developing this tool (after all, there's already pdfTeX 
> etc for that!); the focus was on working directly with AAT fonts. So 
> this whole area of TFM-based font support is very underdeveloped at 
> the moment; but expect to see things improve in the future. For now, 
> the CM (etc) fonts that I bundled with XeTeX in OTF format should 
> work, but beyond that, it's uncharted territory.

Thanks for all the detailed info in your mail, on how XeTeX deals with 
fonts. That helps!

> (Note for the ambitious: if you have the tools to convert your PFBs to 
> OTFs, as I've done for the CM fonts, and make sure the names match 
> your TFMs, you ought to be able to get them to work.)

I won't have time in the coming days, but I might look at it later for 
Lucida fonts, being a heavy user of these. It could be relatively 
simple, as teTeX uses aliases defined in 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/aliases, such as:

	% support old Y&Y names
	hlhr8y.tfm lbr.tfm

so it would be enough to create lbr.otf out of lbr.pfb, and have this 
OTF found in both plain TeX (which looks for lbr.tfm) and LaTeX (which 
looks, in LY1 encoding, for hlhr8y.tfm), I think.

Regarding the conversion of CM fonts, for getting correctly encoded OTF 
fonts, did you use PfaEdit (FontForge) also, or did you switch to 
another tool?

Bruno


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