Re: Re: How to use PostScript font

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Patrick Gundlach wrote:

>Yes, but you stated that "different metrics, different subpaths, urw
>instances either or not present". Different metrics? I can't see any
>differences in metrics between differnent distributions on those
>fonts! Can you? They come from one source, i.e psnfss. Different
>subpaths? Perhaps, but what is the problem? Kpathsea is taking care of
>this. URW or not to URW? Good question, lets get started on this
>subject :-)) If we accept that there is such thing as "psnfss", which
>is preinstalled on almost all TeX systems out there, we can let the
>user decide: use "psnfss-metrics" or the ones generated by $TOOL. And
>I can't see any problems with the spacing with those fonts being too
>LaTeX related. We should be happy about those fonts, since we get
>good fonts (in terms of encodings/spacing/finetuning) for free from
>the LaTeX side.
>  
>
sure, and anyone is free to use what he/she wants; but ... my main 
problem is that i want to *know* what i use; recently i generated a set 
of metrics files using afm2pl which defaults to the ps* defaults and 
since a different spacing and emwidth metrics are used i got strange 
incompatible typeset results; (afm2pl now has a afm2tfm compatibility 
switch); there have been many discussions on how well for instance adobe 
metrics (the standard 35, present in printers, but they may differ over 
time and per platform) match urw's (on tex live, used when embedded) 
[nelson beebe has done quite some research on that]. One problem with 
all those fonts is that they have characteristics that are not reflected 
in the filename (take for instance the slant), emwidth, spacing, etc. 
The later may differ from the ones specified in the afm file. (actually, 
setting those probably makes more sense in tex itself, font dimens and 
such; if i have time i'll look into that: psfnss files with overloaded 
font dimens -) Imagine what would happen if protruding and hz was 
defined in fonts -)

say that i want to mix polish and german (using qx and ec encoding) in 
one doc, i want similar spacing etc, don't i?

concerning the akb file, that's more related to wanting to use adobe 
related metrics

>You are right that there are many other things being to LaTeX related.
>The situation is getting much better. A few years ago the distributions
>only knew about LaTeX. I had major problems with old tetex (memory
>problems for example), now most things work out of the box. 
>  
>
let's hope it stays that way; e.g. context uses one format name for all 
engines, and until now could distinguish on suffix (fmt,efmt,ofmt) but 
web2c/tds now uses one suffix (fmt) and $engine subpath; but not all 
distributions will follow that spec, so context users who use pdfetex 
alongside aleph are worse off (well, texexec can be configured to use 
the web2c/$engine subpath: --engine of in texexec.ini)

another everlasting issue is 8 bit in - 8 bit out (which is now solved 
by context always loading natural.tcx)

that only leaves fonts, patterns, encoding vectors (yes they sometimes 
change, and there can be duplicates in the tree -)

>>encoding, there are in most cases no tfm files etc. They are
>>mentioned here and there, but often not on the system. It took me a
>>while to find out that -because of that- i could not use precoockes
>>metrics at all -)
>>    
>>
>
>Who needs texnansi anyway? (OK, perhaps there are few who really need
>texnansi :-), but we might aks Mr. psnfss to generate texnansi metrics as
>well). 
>  
>
we've always used them, probably before ec was around  -)

actually, the nice thing about afm2pl is that it creates texnansi metric files avoiding virtual fonts. 

Hans  

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