Re: installing a commercial font

[Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>]

At 12:43 pm +0100 19/9/98, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:
>Don't listing to this quap-trap!
>The publically available tools suck.
>The Lords of TeX want you to suffer.
>Just send me the AFM files.
>I promise you it is near trivial!

It all depends...  Berthold will supply you with (I assume) LY1 encoded
tfms which use a different subset of the available glyphs to those in T1
encoding.  Most people use T1 encoding rather than LY1.

Quite who the Lords of TeX are, I couldn't say.  Speaking for myself, I'm
just a normal user, but I've spent quite a lot of time trying (and not
succeeding very well) to improve the available fontinst documentation:
doing my best to reduce suffering while ensuring that we're not forced to
use LY1 encoding which has a few problems (mainly when faced with the lack
of re-encoding in many Wintel TeX dvi drivers).

Fontinst is a *very* powerful tool that suffers only from poor
documentation no matter how much those from Y&Y rant on; its main fault
>From the Y&Y point of view is that it produces OT1, T1, and TS1 encoded
output, rather than Y&Y's pet LY1 encoding.

He's right that the job is near-trivial: if you get fontinst, the following
TeX file will probably do the job:

\input fontinst

\latinfamily{ma1}

\bye

You'll need to make sure the files ma1l8ac.afm and ma1b8ac.afm are in the
same folder as the file above.  fontinst will churn away for a while (don't
worry, it's that slow on everyone's computer), and you'll end up with some
pl and vpl files (as well as some fd files which should have some useful
lines in them).  Convert the pl files to tfms using pltotfm, and convert
each vpl file to a tfm and vf file pair using vptovf.  Then put the files
in the correct place and  everything should work correctly.

Rowland.


>>X-Sender: rebecca-astrid@mail.u-net.com
>>Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 10:25:50 +0100
>>To: Andreas Schott <schott@rzg.mpg.de>
>>From: Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>
>>Subject: Re: installing a commercial font
>>Cc: tex-fonts@math.utah.edu
>>
>>>Dear Font-Experts,
>>>
>>>I need your help. We bought two fonts from Monotype
>>>(ArialMT-CondensedLight and ArialMT-CondensedBold)
>>>and I am not able to get them working correctly.
>>>
>>>All the following references are according to the
>>>texlive3-CDROM (http://www.tug.org/texlive).
>>>
>>>>From the texmf/fontname/monotype.map I extracted that
>>>I the fonts are named ma1l8rc and ma1b8rc (the name
>>>ma1br8rc seems a typo to me).
>>
>>Ah...  This is the name that will be used for the two of the tfm files in a
>>typical LaTeX fount installation.
>>
>>
>>>>From the dvips/base/psfonts.map I found out, that I
>>>had to install the pfb-files as ma1l8ac and ma1b8ac.
>>
>>That's usual; you need to tell dvips that ma1l8rc and ma1b8rc map to these
>>founts, and to re-encoded using the 8r (TeXBase1) encoding vector; there
[snip]

Rowland.