Handy font install script.

Handy font install script.

[John R. Culleton]

The good news is that texfonts works as advertised, and the
fonts can be used for any flavor of TeX except LaTeX which
usually wants an .fd file. Even LaTeX users can use it if they
are willing to use the old fashioned \font statement.

I downloaded the sharefont and freefont collections for use with
Gimp, but then had a need to use some of them with Context. Now
there are dozens of fonts in each collection. So I wrote a
wrapper script for texfonts to save time and errors. Here is my
procedure (Slackware Linux computer, TeX installation taken from
Slackware-current):

1. Create a subdirectory for each font or font family, and move
all the files for the font/family to that subdirectory. 

2. Run Ghostscript utility pf2afm on each font to create needed
afm files (they don't come with.)

3. Modify updmap.cfg to accept a file called plus.map.

4.Move to the subdirectory, then run the following script makefonts, making up 
a
foundry and family name appropriate to the font(s). The command
is: "makefonts foundry family" 
-------------------------------------------------------
mkdir /usr/share/texmf-local/fonts/source/$1
mkdir /usr/share/texmf-local/fonts/source/$1/$2
cp * /usr/share/texmf-local/fonts/source/$1/$2/
texfont --en=8r --ve=$1 --co=$2 --ma --in
cd /usr/share/texmf-local/fonts/map/pdftex/context/
cat *map >plus.map
cp plus.map /usr/share/texmf/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap
updmap
texhash
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5. Modify the tex test file produced by texfonts to include near the
end a \font statement and  "The quick brown fox..." text in all
caps and then in lower case. (Some of these fonts have no lower
case.)

6. compile and inspect the test program. 

As always the script will have to be adapted to your particular
installation. And I haven't bothered to figure out how to make
it work in MSWin.

The change I made in step 6 above might be worth doing in
texfonts. Some donated fonts have problems with spacing between
words, or even with the characters themselves.  The generated afm
files are also suspect in this regard. 

I hope this saves someone some time. 

John Culleton