Re: Installing MinionMM for LaTeX

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 07:56 PM 7/6/99 -0400, Professor Wei-Chau Xie wrote:

>I have purchased Adobe MinionMM font and Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0,
>hoping that I could install MinionMM font for LaTeX. I have TeX Live 4
>implementation of LaTeX on my system (Windows 95); all the files needed
>for latex are in proper places and I could latex a sample file
>correctly.
>
>To run dvips, I need pfb files, such as pmnr8a.pfb, as specified in
>psfonts.map. The book "The LaTeX Graphics Companion" (p.406) says that
>the Multiple Master fonts can be easily manipulated using Adobe Type
>Manager, but does not offer any instructions. The MinionMM font that I
>purchased from Adobe comes with two pfb files, i.e.,  ZGI_____.pfb and
>ZGRG____.pfb, and some instance pss files. When I use Adobe Type Manager
>to generate font instances, such as weight 415, width 535, and size 11
>as suggested by "The LaTeX Graphic Companion", two files were created,
>i.e., ZGRG_HY0.pfm and ZGRG_HY0.pss. These files work perfectly with
>Windows applications such as Microsoft Word but cannot be used with
>dvips (I have tried renamed the files).
>
>My question is how to generate the pfb files that can be used by dvips
>with Adobe Type Manager. I appreciate very much any instructions and
>suggestions that you may offer me.

It's not that easy.  You need special support in your TeX system for multiple 
master fonts.  

(1) For TeX, you have to be able to generate metric files for in-between 
"instances."  Since there are no AFM files, you can't use AFM2TFM or fontinst.
And the format of the MMM metric files is not documented.

(2) For PS output, you have to be able to create the appropriate PS "stubs"
that massage the master PFB into the appropriate "instance".  

Older versions of ATM on older versions of Windows create "PS stub" files
(.pss) for you that you may be able to use.  Recent versions instead modify 
the PS font handling operators to automatically create the instance based 
on the decorated font name.

The "Printer Font Metric" (.pfm) file has the metrics needed to construct the
TFM (except for character bounding boxes).  But you need to first translate
it into something like AFM format.

Regards, Berthold Horn

(Y&Y TeX is well suited for using MM fonts with TeX :-) including
partial font downloading for MM fonts).

Berthold K.P. Horn		mailto:bkph@ai.mit.edu