[pdftex] Problem with TrueType fonts - error "Bad metric"

[Stefan Ohletz]

Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> Stefan Ohletz wrote:
>
>> Am I doing anything wrong or is this some known bug of pdftex? Can 
>> anyone reproduce this error message with the Helium font I referred 
>> to above? To be honest, I don't have a clue what role encodings play 
>> when installing font files. Could this be a source of errors, perhaps?
>
> Looks like you found a bug in ttf2afm, because the generated afm file
> for Helium had
>
>   XHeight 64960
>
> and that is more than 100 times too much (should be 576). I manually
> fixed that line and now it seems fine. It could also be a bug in the
> font itself, that ttf2afm does not know how to handle.

Thank you very much for your help. I solved the problem!

It doesn't seem to be a real bug in ttf2afm, because the demo version of 
a TrueType font editor revealed that XHeight was set to 64960 already in 
the font file, in the section "Include PCL5 data".

To me as a newbie it seems that one has to know a lot about the file 
formats and the myriads of options one can change in the .ttf font file, 
which probably also means that one has to have ready a font editor to 
fix some problems (well, maybe it would suffice to get to know the .afm 
format, would it?).

Anyhow, I feel a bit reminded of the phrase "TeX font mess" I already 
read on so many web pages. I'm still a bit puzzled about the fact that 
the font installs seamlessly on Windows, but can't be properly converted 
by TeX. I guess TeX uses (has to use) other data included in the font 
file (PCL5) than Windows, but I don't really understand why. As the 
vendor Softmaker advertises, its font collection can be used under 
Windows, Linux and OS/2. Considering Linux, there seem to be working 
open source libraries to handle TrueType fonts. Why isn't it possible 
for TeX to use such apparently working open source libraries?

Many greetings,
Stefan