[Fontinst] DESIGNUNITS and (un)rounded reals

[Lars Hellström]

At 00.13 +0200 2003-07-08, Marco Kuhlmann wrote:
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>    Hi folks,
>
>I want to use lcdf-typetools' (http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/)
>otftotfm together with fontinst to install Adobe's Minion Pro on my TeX
>distribution.  Unfortunately, the programs seem to have different
>understandings of what constitutes a correct pl file.

Yes, fontinst's PL parser make a lot of assumptions to the effect that the
file should look as if it was generated by TFtoPL. E.g. Alan wrote the
following comment:

% Many of the PL commands are ignored, and I'm assuming the |R|s are in
% the places \texttt{tftopl} puts them, which is a bit naughty of me.

There is however an easy solution: First convert the PL to a TFM using
pltotf, then convert it back using tftopl. This will reformat the code as
fontinst expects it.

>(a)  otftotfm sets DESIGNUNITS to 1000, while fontinst seems to expect it
>to be 1.  (Is that correct?)

Yes.

>(b)  fontinst can not deal with some of the numerical values emitted by
>otftotfm; it seems to always expect a dotted decimal, even if there are
>only zeros on the right hand side of the dot (eg, 1.00 instead of 1):
>
>! Paragraph ended before \pl_rounded_real was complete.
>
>I have never studied the spec for the pl format, but it would be
>interesting of course to reach a common ground on these issues.  Do you
>have any opinions on this?

The output of ofmtotfm is probably correct, even though I am a bit worried
about the DESIGNUNITS, since as I recall it there are restrictions on the
maximal premitted size of a real number in PL files. It could be that one
still won't run into those for normal fonts though.

The PL parser in fontinst is known not to handle generic PL files, but that
is usually not a problem since pltotf+tftopl can be used to "normalize" the
files.

Lars Hellström