[Fontinst] a question about installing "Webdings.ttf"

[Lars Hellström]

At 00.23 +0200 2005-04-10, Peter Scott wrote:
>Dear readers:
>
>I have been working on translating a truetype
>dingbat font (e.g. Webdings.ttf --- a microsoft font
>available for free from the webpagepublicity site)
>for use as a font in TeX.  (I am a plain TeX person,
>eschewing LaTeX.)  While I have succeeded (see the
>steps below), the \latinfamily macro seems to
>provide too much for the job, since I run into the
>weeds using it, as described below.

True, \latinfamily isn't at all the thing to use for a dingbat font. What
you need to do is probably just to convert the font metrics to TFM format
and add a mapfile entry---after that you should be ready to rock. Whereas
fontinst is designed for more complicated tasks, it can do this too, but as
you probably noticed afm2tfm accomplished it more directly. Basically your
Step 4 (and hence also 5) is redundant for this case when you're not going
to do anything to the font other than the format conversions.

>MY QUESTIONS:
>
>Are there alternative commands I could put in
>"file.tex" (step 4 above) so that the "tex file"
>command will complete nicely?

A \setint{xheight}{500} might let it complete nicely, but it wouldn't
produce anything useful, as it is trying to build a font of latin letters
from what is available in a dingbat font. Pretty much a lost cause, I'd say.

>Is there a better way to transform this font for use
>in TeX?

I would do that as

   \input fontinst.sty
   \afmtomtx{fwdr8a}{fwdr8a}
   \mtxtopl{fwdr8a}{fwdr8a}
   \bye

Run "tex file" and then "pltotf fwdr8a.pl", but as remarked above, this
only does the same thing as the afmtotfm (perhaps even slightly less).

A more roundabout variant (generating an FD file) would be

   \input fontinst.sty
   \needsfontinstversion{1.928}
   \recordtransforms{fwd-rec.tex}
   \installfonts
      \installfamily{U}{fwd}{}
      \installrawfont{fwdr8a}{fwdr8a}{mtxasetx fwdr8a}{U}{fwd}{m}{n}{}
   \endinstallfonts
   \endrecordtransforms
   \bye

but I doubt you'd feel that is an advantage.

Lars Hellström