[XeTeX] Re: Mathtime fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Sep 2004, at 4:51 pm, Paul Edney wrote:

> It this to mean that Gerben's LaTeX and TeXshop don't use xdv2pdf at 
> all to generate their pdf's?  If I use LaTeX with Mathtime and 
> TeX+ghostscript instead of PDFtex, and then use dvipdf on the .dvi 
> (note, not .xdv) file, then the characters still display correctly in 
> the pdf document.

xdv2pdf is *only* used in conjunction with xetex; either explicitly, by 
using the -no-pdf option to create an .xdv file and then running the 
xdv2pdf tool, or implicitly, as xetex without -no-pdf runs xdv2pdf as a 
child process and sends its output via a pipe.

> Obviously I'm way out my league here, but could there be a fundamental 
> difference in the way .xdv and .dvi are encoded (i.e., more than just 
> an 'extension' of dvi, as the 'x' implies).

.xdv is an extension of .dvi, adding new codes to support Unicode text 
using AAT/OT fonts, as well as graphics included using \XeTeXpicfile 
(via QuickTime graphics import) and \XeTeXpdffile (via CoreGraphics).

>   And by association, do xdv2pdf and dvipdf read fonts in 
> fundamentally different ways?

Yes, because everything xdv2pdf draws is drawn through CoreGraphics 
(Quartz). And therefore all fonts that it's going to use have to be 
available to the Apple Type Services (ATS) system; either installed as 
regular Mac OS X fonts in one of the standard places, or activated 
on-demand by xdv2pdf from .otf files. ATS does *not* support a number 
of the font file formats that dvipdf (or pdfTeX) use, such as .pfb, 
.pk, etc.

>
>> If I learned enough about FontForge, maybe I could come up with a
>> .pfb->.otf script that handles these issues..... or if I thoroughly
>> documented what xdv2pdf is doing, maybe someone else would deal with
>> it. It's all just a question of time.....
>>
>>>  I'm guessing (very wildly) from Bruno's message below that this
>>>  reencoding step might have an effect.  Btw, Bruno, I used to use
>>>  mathtime on textures through ATM, so the fonts were never in the
>>>  system folder.  But why would TeX search the classic folder for 
>>> fonts
>>>  in the first place?  Did I misunderstand you?  Should I _also_ copy
>>>  the original mathtime fonts to the system folder, or at least 
>>> activate
>>>  them with fontbook?
>>>
>>>  Also, could Bruno's note about the hybrid mathtime explain why +, -,
>>>  \ldots, and parentheses (of all sizes) render, but nothing else?
>>
>> Maybe; I don't fully understand what that's about. I wonder if it's
>> simply a character/glyph mapping problem, though.
>>
>
>
> Jonathan, is adding these tables manually to an otf font doable for 
> the non-font-expert, and if so, do you have a reference as to how 
> these tables are encoded so I might give it a shot for mathtime?

Documentation and tools are available from Apple's font site 
(http://developer.apple.com/fonts/), but they're definitely for the 
technically-inclined, not the average end user.

Jonathan