[XeTeX] Fwd: Problem with pfb fonts/T1Wrap

[Christos Papachristou]

> > I am using xetex version 0.94 and trying to make it use the greek
> > postscript fonts I use for latex . Using a simple text file with the
> > following preamble
> >
> > \documentclass[12pt,a4paper,twoside,openright]{report}
> > \usepackage[american,greek]{babel}
> > \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
> > \usepackage{ucs}
> > \begin{document}
> >
> > I get the following error messages.
> >
> > ) [1] (./greektest.aux)exception: SimplePSInterpreterException
> > reason: condition in if is not a boolean
> >
> > *** font activation failed (status=0): grmn1200.pfb
> >
> > *** font grmn1200 (TeX-grmn1200: file 'grmn1200.pfb') not found
> >
> > *** font grmn1200 (grmn1200.pfb) not found, will substitute Helvetica
> > glyphs
> >
> >
> > LaTeX Font Warning: Some font shapes were not available, defaults
> > substituted.
> >
> >
> > It seemed to me at the beginning that it was a path problem, yet when
> > I tried to convert the grmn1200.pfb from the cbgreek package manually
> > using the T1Wrap utility, I got the message "exception:
> > SimplePSInterpreterException  reason: condition in if is not a
> > boolean" and no output. Is this a bug in T1Wrap or am I doing
> > something wrong?
>
> It's a bug (or maybe I should say a "limitation"!) in T1Wrap.
>
> The tool has to parse the Type 1 font in order to correctly "wrap" it
> for Quartz and provide the encoding information XeTeX needs. But it
> doesn't have a complete PostScript Type 1 interpreter, only a
> quick-and-dirty "pseudo-interpreter" that I hacked up (and Massimiliano
> of TeXniscope fame then converted to Objective-C for better
> performance). There are certain types of PostScript coding found in
> some .pfb fonts that it doesn't handle adequately---and you seem to
> have found a font that is affected by this.
>
> We may be able to enhance the tool to handle this better, but that will
> take some time and effort, and isn't likely to happen right away.
>
> In general, if you're wanting to use legacy (non-Unicode) fonts like
> this, there's little reason to use XeTeX rather than pdfTeX. To typeset
> Greek with XeTeX, I'd generally recommend using a Unicode-compliant
> Greek font (e.g., Gentium, Galatia SIL, or others), and avoiding
> packages such as "inputenc" and "ucs". These exist to provide support
> for some Unicode characters within an 8-bit TeX setup, but are not
> really appropriate for a fully Unicode-based working environment.
>
> JK

Thank you very much, you have spared me a lot of meaningless searching. 
However, I always prefer to use the term "advanced feature" rather than 
"bug" or "limitation" for my own programs. :-P
But anyway, there are some very well designed greek fonts for TeX . Is 
there a way to easily (preferably) convert them to Unicode manually? 
Just the few available glyphs, of course.

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