[XeTeX] Typographical question: xetex' default wordspacing (\fontdimen2--7)
Jonathan Kew
jonathan_kew at sil.org
Mon Jun 26 21:05:26 CEST 2006
On 26 Jun 2006, at 7:52 pm, Joachim Trinkwitz wrote:
> Am 24.06.2006 um 12:22 schrieb Jonathan Kew:
>
>> If it's an old Type 1 font, xetex doesn't currently support kerning
>
> Ouch, this is bad news for me, as most of my commercial fonts are
> Type 1 ...
>
> How old is "old" in this context? Are there "newer" Type 1 fonts,
> which are supported?
No, that's "old Type 1" as opposed to "new OpenType/CFF", the 21st
century way of using Postscript curves to draw glyphs!
Of course, if you have traditional Type 1 fonts, you may be using
them with TFM files, fontmap entries, etc., and all that should still
work. But that doesn't bring you into the Unicode world.
One thing that I have in mind is to enable xetex to read an AFM file
along with a PFB, and thus support kerning for such fonts, but I'm
afraid this hasn't reached the top of the to-do list yet....
> Maybe another naive question: would it help to convert my fonts in
> OTF, e.g. with fontforge or another software?
If FontForge or other software can import the kerning data from an
AFM file (I assume your Type 1 fonts came with AFMs), and then
include that in an OTF version, then yes.
I'm fairly sure FontLab can do this (though I've never tried); I
don't use FontForge, so can't speak for it, but my guess is that it
probably has such a feature.
JK
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