Re: BlueSky fonts and subfont (and FixFont)

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

I wrote:
>> Has anyone had success using the BlueSky fonts with Basil K. Malyshev's
>> fload font loading program, especially the subfont program it uses
>> to generate subset/partial fonts? [Right now it crashes with them.]

... and Berthold replied:
> The program cannot handle arbitrary Type 1 fonts, only Bakoma.  
> It gets stuck in the encrypted part which is not in exactly the same
> form as that in BaKoMa fonts.

That turns out to be not quite true. It turns out that it is possible
to massage (some) other fonts (including the BlueSky ones) into a form
that subfont will parse. Certainly though, subfont's parser isn't robust.
(Plus it had a bug in dealing with fonts that had no `Subrs'.)

>> [Does anyone] reading this list [know] of an alternate program for
>> making font subsets[?].
> 
> DOWNLOAD and/or SUBFONT from Y&Y can do this sort of thing.  
> But again, I don't see the point.

DOWNLOAD and/or SUBFONT from Y&Y aren't free though, right? (This isn't
something I'd really want to spend any money doing.)

>> The task is converting some legacy PostScript files (without the
>> original DVI files that created them) from using bitmaps to using
>> PostScript fonts, so neither dvips 5.66a nor dvipsone's partial font
>> loading are likely to help.

I forgot to mention here that I'm using the marvelous `FixFont' utility
for this task.

> How about the following: rip out the bitmap fonts.  Insert references
> to the outline fonts, but *do not include the fonts themselves* Then
> run through Distiller.  Take the resulting PDF file read it into
> Acrobat Reader and print to file.  if you have told Distiller where
> the fonts are and you have changes it settings to always subset you
> will have what you want.

Yes, this possibility occured to me (except that I'd have included the
PostScript fonts (unsubsetted) in the file to distill, since distiller
is of on another machine somewhere). But I guess I couldn't let go of
the fact that it'd work for BaKoMa and not for BlueSky; I needed to try
to fix it -- call me obsessive. (And, as we saw in a later e-mail, I
succeeded.)

One remaining issue is that even with the BlueSky fonts, replacing the
PK fonts with type1 fonts doesn't result in the exact same output. Some
positioning is subtly changed (in long runs of text) -- it's especially
noticiable in things like tables of contents where the numbers on the
righthand side turns out wobbly. Anyone know of why this might happen
and better how it might be fixed?

Regards,

    Melissa.

P.S. Also, does anyone know whether `t1disasm | t1asm' performed on a
font is in any way lossy? (I'd like to be sure that I've not damaged
my BlueSky fonts in way by piping them through these tools).