[tex-live] Font encoding/conversion help desperately needed

Gerben Wierda Sherlock@rna.nl
Mon, 6 Jan 2003 01:21:38 +0100


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?

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