[luatex] dump a tfm to a file

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:56:47 -0500 schrieb Luis Rivera:

>> With context mkii (texlive 2009, pdftex engine: test.mkii is an utf-8 file)
>> %%% test.mkii

>> goo €æß@cc

> From above I infer that the translation works only for the UTF8
> characters that fit in ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1):

No, tex4ht/mkii (which use 8-bit-pdftex) can handle a much larger
part of utf8 the same way as tex4ht/latex can do it: by using
various font encodings. 

tex4ht contains already a lot of support for various font encodings
so it is no wonder that a test with mkii gives something sensible.
 

> If Ulrike's only problem is the Euro character, 

No the euro is only a good test object as it is in ansinew encoding
but in unicode outside the  < 256 block. 

If you want to write a text with e.g. greek and english with
pdflatex you need at least two font encodings (T1 and LGR) and two
fonts. 

With luatex one encoding ("Unicode") and one large "unicode" font is
enough. 

I want to find out if tex4ht can handle large "unicode" htf-fonts
too. 


> If indeed tex4ht is a dvi driver, it should *not* work with UTF8 (or
> even BMP encoded ofm files), given the specification (single 8 bit
> integer) of the dvi format, regardless how you patch the tfm/htf
> files. She really needs, as Robin suggests, a successor to tex4ht that
> ignores the single 8 bit limitation of the input (dvi) format.

dvi doesn't care about the input encoding, it encodes character
positions in fonts. 

The dvi's generated by luatex (if I inspect them with dv2dt) look
actually quite similar to dvi's generated by latex. E.g. they
contain - if I use an unicode font and input an € - the entry "s1
8364" (8364 = hex 20AC). "Normal" dvi have similar entries - only
the numbers are smaller. 

So tex4ht could work with luatex if
1. the tfm of the fonts loaded is not needed for something essentiel
(I hope only for ligatures) and that ine can use some simple
dummies.

2. tex4ht can handle large versions of its htf-fonts and don't
tumble over the large character numbers.

I don't have time this week-end to make more tests but I will look
again next week.



-- 
Ulrike Fischer