Re: Installing Truetype fonts in context.

["John R. Culleton" <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Saturday 04 June 2005 09:34 pm, Hans Hagen wrote:
> John R. Culleton wrote:
> > ttf2afm -e 8r.enc -o ds_izmir.afm ds_izmir.ttf
>
> ttf2afm -a -o ds_izmir.afm ds_izmir.ttf
>
> will produce an afm with *all* glyph names/metrics, the 8r will be made
> from that one next time; ssuch an afm can be used then for other encodings
> as well
>

Interesting fact #1: The ttv2afm program that comes with
Slackware-current (version =1.0) doesn't use the -a option. The
ttf2afm program that comes with TeXlive does. OTOH the Slack
version allows for the option -v for version but the TeXlive
version doesn't. The source in the TeXLive distro says it is
version 1.0 also. So we have two variants of ttf2afm, both
claiming to be version 1.0. The limited TeX for Linux distro from
Pragma.nl is apparently the same as the texLive version in this
respect.  Therefore I will use the TeXLive version of ttf2afm.

Interesting fact #2. The afm files produced for this particular
font  by the TeXLive version with and without option -a are
virtually identical. Here are the results of the diff:

-------------------------------------
< Comment Converted at Sun Jun  5 07:57:17 2005 by ttf2afm from font file 
`ds_izmir.ttf'
---
> Comment Converted at Sun Jun  5 07:56:39 2005 by ttf2afm from font file 
`ds_izmir.ttf'
15c15,17
< StartCharMetrics 457
---
> StartCharMetrics 459
> C -1 ; WX 500 ; N .notdef ; B 0 0 0 0 ;
> C -1 ; WX 0 ; N .null ; B 0 0 0 0 ;
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Continuing:

> > With this run stream texfont has two complaints: first that it is an
> > unknown vendor and
> > second that it cannot find either a pfa or pfb file.
>
> can you check the map file? maybe you need to replace the pfb suffix by ttf
>
> Hans
-- 
Interesting Fact #3. Apparently the map file created by texfont
needs this tweak. This is not documented elsewhere. 

Interesting Fact #4. There is a more or less undocumented option of texfont
which apparently converts a ttf file to its pfb equivalent using
pfaedit. Since pfaedit is now fontforge perhaps fontforge needs
to be aliased back to the earlier name. Or perhaps it doesn't
work with the latest fontforge. I will explore further. Whether
this option is intended to be used alone or integrated in a
regular texfont run is also not clear. No doubt Hans will
enlighten all of us. 

The plot thickens, but hopefully the light at the end of the ttf
font tunnel is not just another onrushing train. 

John Culleton
f