[pdftex] Font encoding/conversion help desperately needed

[Siep]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003 01:21:38 +0100
Gerben Wierda <Sherlock at rna.nl> wrote:

> I am trying to create an automatic conversion of TrueType fonts on
> my Mac OS X system to something usable by TeX. I have decided that
> ttf2tex is not an option, as it only produces a way to embed TTF in
> pdfTeX (and pdfTeX also does not supports slanted TTF, so it is
> incomplete too), but ttf2tex is not compatible with dvips and I
> want to support that too. Besides, ttf2tex only supports T1
> encoding and it would be nice to support both T1 and OT1. So, I
> need another route.
> 
> I have used fondu to convert Apple's fonts to separate ttf files. I
> 
> have followed ttf2tex's naming convention, e.g. for GillSans:
> 
>          GillSansLight.ttf       ,       mgsl16.ttf
>          GillSansLightItalic.ttf ,       mgsli16.ttf
>          GillSans.ttf            ,       mgsr16.ttf
>          GillSansItalic.ttf      ,       mgsri16.ttf
>          GillSansBold.ttf        ,       mgsb16.ttf
>          GillSansBoldItalic.ttf  ,       mgsbi16.ttf
> 
> I am now looking at using ttf2pt1 to convert TTF to Type1. The
> results seem pretty good (at one point I was able to look at the
> results, I forget what I hacked to get that working). But now I
> need to automate a lot of work (map files for use with pdftex and
> dvips, fd files for LaTeX, encodings?).
> 
> fontinst looked promising. But when I run ttf2afm on my ttf files,
> they seem not to have an encoding (all numbers are -1). Fontinst
> seems to expect something like mgsb8a but ttf2tex says the TTF
> stuff should be renamed to mgsb16. 8a is Adobe standard, 16 seems
> to be Unicode. How should I handle my afm files so that fontinst
> produces all the fd, tfm, etc?

The afm-file references glyphs by name. It shouldn't matter which, if
any, glyphs get assigned a slot, so the lack of an encoding shouldn't
matter. I believe I did at one point use fontinst to process these
afms.

Another problem is that TrueType handles font families differently,
which doesn't help if you want to automatically define font families
for TeX.

The best way to handle missing slanted ttfs is to define italics as a
substitute in the fd file. I don't know whether or not fontinst will
do that for you. Anyhow, artificial slanting is frowned upon by
typographers.

The main problem seems to me the renaming.

Siep

> 
> ttf2pt1 can also produce an AFM file as well from the TTF. This one
> 
> says the encoding is FontSpecific but that is all. And something
> like dotlessi is missing for instance. Besides, the AFMs produced
> by ttf2afm and ttf2pt1 differ substantially.
> 
> I am lost. I am so lost I do not even know what to ask and how to 
> describe my situation properly.
> 
> Can some guru help me get one TTF font converted to type1 and
> installed for TeX & LaTeX (both OT1 and T1)?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> G
> 
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-- 
Siep Kroonenberg
siep at elvenkind.com