Re: installing fonts pdftex

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On Jan 27, 2009, at 12:28 AM, Mohamed Bana wrote:

> Hi Thomas,
>

Hi,

please address questions to the mailing-list, not to me personally.

> 1. when is the last time you tried to install a font manually using  
> texfont?  i've been trying to get install warnockpro and cronospro -  
> both of which are .otf - but i've had no lack.
>
> texfont --makepath --install --fontroot=`pwd` --vendor=adobe -- 
> co=warnockpro --en=texnansi --lcdf --preproc -- 
> variant=liga,kern,smcp,onum
>
> the last time i checked texfont was generating an empty map file.

texfont is really old, it predates opentype fonts, so you can't expect  
it to handle such fonts. It was a brave and wonderful effort to  
automate installation of fonts, but I gave up using it - not because  
texfont itself is bad, but because so many fonts are just faulty and/ 
or idiosyncratic, and automatization just can't handle all these  
eceptions. I always had to double-check and edit files by hand, so I  
decided to go for a manual process. The --lcdf switch was added by  
Adam Lindsay, who also wrote a short article about otf and ConTeXt: http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2005-2/lindsay/lindsay.pdf 
  Too bad Adam isn't active anymore, he was a great help in ConTeXt  
development. If you search the mailing list archive for "texfont  
lcdf," you will see that the problem with the empty map file is common  
and was never really solved, AFAIK.

So you have several options:

1. install the fonts manually

2. use texfont and write the map file manually

3. try Patrick's otfinst http://wiki.contextgarden.net/otfinst

4. I have a set of support files for using Cronos and Warnock with  
pdftex; if you want, I can make a zip and send them to you (not before  
Thursday, however).
>
>
> the free version of lucida (.ttf) that ship with Java files worked  
> fine
>
> 2. is there someone i must do to get to dashes working properly?  as  
> in, --- doesn't generate the right dash nor does --.

These are defined as ligatures in the tfm/vf files. Doesn't texfont  
produce vpl-files as an intermediate format? You could open those and  
check whether the ligature is defined. It probably isn't, and then you  
have to hunt down the reason or add it manually...


Good luck

Thomas
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________