[pdftex] Fonts without afm files.

[Adrian Heathcote]

But it has to be remembered that many digital fonts have particularly 
sloppy afm files, particularly when it comes to kerning data. In 
installing some fonts from Monotype I have had to adjust the kerns and 
reinstall several times before the font was usable. So it is possible 
to use the below mentioned tools to get the glyph dimension data, and 
1) either write the kerning table oneself, or 2) use the kerning data 
from a similarly styled font, copying it over, then adjusting. The 
result could not be worse than some digital fonts that are out there.

(It is noteworthy that though there have been well-publicised errors in 
the kerns for Monotype Garamond, for example, and though it would take 
5 minutes for the company to fix the mistakes, the errors persist after 
some 15 years in the market place.)

The moral is that kerning data is not something that needs to be 
treated so preciously.

cheers

Adrian Heathcote

On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 02:21  AM, Thierry Bouche wrote:

> Le lundi 17 février 2003 à 10:34:28, John Culleton écrivit :
>
> JC> I have the drill down now for preparing downloaded Type1 fonts for
> JC> use with pdfetex. Also I have a fistful of interesting type1 fonts
> JC> already on my system, such as the Freefont collection that can be
> JC> used with Gimp.
>
> JC> Problem is, the additional fonts have a pfb file but no afm file.
>
> I thought you were something like a professional typographer. I'm
> puzzled you need this info!
>
> If you happen to have a PFB without an AFM, you'd better not use it,
> unless it's monowidth.
>
> You always can make an AFM from a PFB with gs' printafm, or getmetrics,
> or whatever, but there are things in an AFM that bear importance when
> doing fine prints, which you can't generate from a PFB, like kerns.
>
>
>
>  Thierry Bouche
>
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