[XeTeX] FontSite 500 fonts and XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Oct 2007, at 12:12 pm, Markus Bongard wrote:

> gentle persons,
>
> On Oct 12, 2007;41, at 12:26–Oct 12, 2007, R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar
> wrote:
>>
>> with XeLaTeX rather than LaTeX. The fonts in any one family in this
>> CD come in
>> several TTF files rather than several OTF files. I have been trying
>> to use the
>> URW Grotesk fonts, which come in 14 files so:
>
> while you have to check with the included copyright of the fonts, by
> using fontforge <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> you can
> technically convert z.B.: TT to OpenType.

Note that simply converting the font format will not make any  
difference; the issue is not .ttf versus .otf, but whether they are  
Unicode-compliant and make use of OpenType Layout features to access  
the various alternate glyphs (small caps, fractions, etc.). It's  
perfectly OK to have OpenType features in .ttf-packaged fonts, and  
xetex can make use of them if present, but xetex and fontspec can't  
do anything special with these legacy "expert" fonts that are really  
just separate, custom-encoded (non-Unicode) fonts. These require  
custom handling in the application (I expect things like PageMaker or  
XPress probably had some features designed to support them); in the  
TeX world, the alphabet soup of .tfm, .vf, .fd, .enc, .map, etc.  
provides a mechanism that could be used.

FontForge (free) or FontLab (commercial) could be used to generate  
modern, Unicode-based, OpenType Layout-enabled fonts from such legacy  
sets, but it's a bigger task than simply converting the fonts  
from .ttf to .otf packaging. (And that's without looking into the  
legalities; many font licenses would not actually allow you to do  
such things.)

JK