[tex-live] TTF versus Type1 versus Type42

[Gerben Wierda]

Hello,

I am still looking for the best way to get my Apple TrueType (TTF) 
fonts available in TeX on Mac OS X. I am mailing this out to report on 
the current state of affairs and to sollicit help or information from 
anyone who can shed more light on this complicated business.

I have used Fondu succesfully to convert Apple fonts to separate TTF 
files. Given that I need to convert them using a batch process (by hand 
is not an option as I want to ship a script that does all the work to 
all the other Mac OS X TeX users, there are basically 3 options after 
that.

1. Use ttf2tex. This produces the means to use the TTF files from 
pdfTeX, but only partly as slanted TTF fonts are not supported in 
pdfTeX. dvips and dvipdfm are only supported through bitmaps (using 
gsftopk to bitmap render the ttf font). This will also mean that dvips 
and pdfTeX cannot share map files, which increases maintenance 
complexity. ttf2tex has support for TeX's font selection mechanism and 
produces the correct map, fd and encoding files on the fly. ttf2tex 
produces T1 encoding. T1 encoding means that for most intent and 
purposes, the user will also have to use CM-Super to prevent the use of 
bitmaps for fonts other than the Apple fonts.

2. TTF can be converted to Type1 using ttf2pt1. However, since TTF 
hinting is lost, quality loss may occur. I haven't seen the reults yet. 
Having type1 is of course best from the TeX perspective, as all TeX 
renderers (dvipdfm, dvips, pdfTeX) can handle type1. Possible quality 
loss is worrying me, though. I do not know yet what kind of encoding 
ttf2pt1 produces.

3. TTF can be converted to Type42. This happens without quality loss. 
It remains to be seen if all renderers on the TeX side can handle these 
fonts. This does not work yet here, because the program (ttfps) 
produces invalid font names in the output file.

Any light that can be shed on this by anyone is very welcome.

G