[texhax] OTF, FontForge, and Right Justification

[Barbara Beeton]

    I'm trying to make the Opentype font *MinionPro* usable by plain TeX. The
    program FontForge, which runs under X on *NIX-systems, does the conversion
    with a minimum of fuss, and the resulting .pfb and .tfm files are put into
    the right places. And the typeface looks lovely in TeX files... except for
    one thing. The paragraphs are all ragged-right rather than justified. This
    isn't due to any formatting, either; it's as though TeX is using the wrong
    set of information about letterspacing (although the kerning etc. looks
    pretty good).

    What has gone wrong here? How can I fix it?

it sounds to me like there isn't any stretch
(or shrink) for the interword space.  i don't
know fontforge, but it may prompt you about
this.  otherwise, you check this by running
the program tftopl on the tfm file.

computer modern fonts allow in general 1/6 em
(expressed in points for the design size) for
stretch and 1/9 em for shrink.

tex doesn't use a character in the font for
the interword space, but a separately defined
parameter in the tfm file.  the basic value is
fixed width, and justification is accomplished
by applying the specified stretch and shrink
as appropriate/necessary.

see p.433 of the texbook for more information.
						-- bb