[pdftex] Suggestion: Know about Postscript Fonts?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

ivo welch writes:
 > When pdftex cannot locate a font, it falls back to the old metafont
 > system.  Would it make sense for our pdf-centric pdftex program to
 > first try a fallback to a postscript font (pf[ab] and afm) in the
 > kpsewhich path, before it falls back to meta font?

No, if the information how to treat a particular font is missing,
nothing else than to try metafont can be done.

 > Now that I have struggled with postscript font installation for a week
 > (and have it basically working), I really wonder why I cannot simply
 > place my postscript fonts into a directory
 > 
 >   $ ls /usr/local/texmf-local/fonts/postscript/
 >   cp30c.pfb cp30c.afm

No, you can't, you have to associate PostScript "/FontName"s with file
names.  This is achieved by .map files in the TeX world and by Fontmap
in the Ghostscript world.  And neither TeX nor Ghostscript reads .afm
files. 

See also:

   http://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf 

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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