Working with a Greek Truetype font.

[Lars Hellström]

Regarding Jeffrey McArthur's mail:

What encoding you should use depends on what you want to use the font for.
In this case: do you want greek for math or greek for text? In the math
case you'll probably want to use OML as the encoding for the font TeX is to
work with. In the text case (which is the one you seem to be aiming at
since you want to add ligatures), things get trickier. I think the LaTeX
standard encoding name for greek is T3, and hence the file you would want
to use with fontinst should be called t3.etx, but I can't say I've ever
seen such a file anywhere. Perhaps there is some fontinst user somewhere
who has produced such a file? In any case, if you know the encoding vector
then it isn't that hard to create an encoding file from scratch (as long as
you don't try to build in a lot of intelligence into it), it's just a bit
boring. (Frequent use of \nextslot is recommended, it limits errors due to
forgetting a single slot somewhere.)

There is also the matter of the encoding of the raw font. Here much is
dependent on the driver (which in your case would be a part of pdftex). If
the driver can reencode the font, then you can simply choose as raw
encoding any encoding which contains all the glyphs you need, since
fontinst can freely reencode fonts (use \transformfont and \reencodefont).
If the driver can't, then you're probably in trouble. I suspect people on
the pdftex list can tell you all you need to know about that part, however.

Lars Hellström

PS: If you can find a postscript ENC file for some encoding you want to
use, then fontinst might be able to produce a skeleton ETX file for that
encoding for you. Just give the command

  \enctoetx{myenc}{myenc}

Given that myenc.enc exists, this will create myenc.etx for you. This
myenc.etx will not set any fontdimens or ligatures though, so you will have
to edit it further if you are going to use it for anything more than raw
fonts. Furthermore I'm not sure what assumptions \enctoetx will make about
the syntax of myenc.enc, so I can't guarantee it will work. It can save you
a lot of typing, though.