Re: [9fans] [RFC] fonts and unicode/utf [TeX]

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 05:17:16PM -0400, Michael Kerpan wrote:
>
> The subfont system works fine if you both have a complete Type 1 font
> set including all the "expert fonts" including the extra glyphs and
> the like AND are willing to put together a mapping for it. The problem
> is that fonts haven't shipped (to consumers, at least) in that form
> for about 10 years. Unless I fundamentally misunderstand the subfont
> system (which I admit that I might), for  any font made within the
> last 10 years or so, using the subfont/virtual font system would
> entail the following steps:
> 1. Break the complete OpenType font down into a combination of PFBs
> and AFMs containing the complete set of characters between them,
>[...]

You miss my point: the "subfont" is just letting the inners of TeX alone
by splitting, for TeX, tfm in subfonts.

The fonts by themselves are left alone. The dvi drivers deal with the
fonts; not TeX. TeX needs only the metrics. After some substitutions (by
virtual fonts), TeX tells only "take this glyph of this font and put it
here". And the font, eventually, has a foreign link to the TFM used by
TeX.

The main particularity with afm2tfm(1) is that the PostScript standard
encoding is not Unicode, even not latin1. So one needs to specify an
encoding.

As long as the encoding of the fonts is known, a program will "import"
(just creates the TFM) for a font so that TeX will know the metrics.

The main support is in the dvi drivers (mainly dvips(1)).
--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
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