Some observations about the URW-Garamond

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

I played around a bit with the new URW-Garamond that URW donated to the 
TeX community; as you may have seen on the list, the font files can be 
downloaded via CTAN at CTAN/fonts/urw/garamond/ If you fetch the entire 
directory, you'll find
1. the font in .afm, .pfb and .pfm format,
2. support files for LaTeX written by Walter Schmidt, with instructions 
for installation.

After installation, the font worked in LaTeX, but wouldn't work in 
ConTeXt "out of the box." I didn't spend time to figure out why because 
creating the necessary files with texfont is a snap. For beginners, a 
very brief how-to:

1. copy the afm- and pfb-files into a working directory, cd to this 
directory;
2. run the command
for f in ugm*.afm do texfont --fontroot=~/texmf --ve=urw --co=garamond 
--ma --in
(adjusting ~/texmf to wherever you want the font installed)

(Of course, you can add other encodings if you wish.)

Then I hit a problem. texfont creates map entries in this format:

texnansi-raw-ugmm8a GaramondNo8-Med 4 < ugmm8a.pfb texnansi.enc
texnansi-raw-ugmmi8a GaramondNo8-MedIta 4 < ugmmi8a.pfb texnansi.enc
texnansi-raw-ugmr8a GaramondNo8-Reg 4 < ugmr8a.pfb texnansi.enc
texnansi-raw-ugmri8a GaramondNo8-Ita 4 < ugmri8a.pfb texnansi.enc

My version of pdfetex (3.141592-1.20b-rc5-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.3)) refused to 
read these entries (problems with backward compoatibility?). After I 
rewrote to the format I found in the map that comes with the font

texnansi-raw-ugmr8a GaramondNo8-Reg " TeXnANSIEncoding ReEncodeFont " 
<texnansi.enc <ugmr8a.pfb
texnansi-raw-ugmri8a GaramondNo8-Reg " TeXnANSIEncoding ReEncodeFont " 
<texnansi.enc <ugmri8a.pfb
texnansi-raw-ugmm8a GaramondNo8-Reg " TeXnANSIEncoding ReEncodeFont " 
<texnansi.enc <ugmm8a.pfb
texnansi-raw-ugmmi8a GaramondNo8-Reg " TeXnANSIEncoding ReEncodeFont " 
<texnansi.enc <ugmmi8a.pfb

everything was golden. You now have a version of Garamond for those who 
are too poor or too cheap to buy the real McCoy. The font looks nice to 
me (I'm not an expert), especially in its italic version. You get 
regular, italic, semi-bold and semi-bold italics, no expert ligatures, 
no old-style numerals.

I wrote a very basic typescript file:

\usetypescriptfile[type-buy]

\starttypescript [serif] [urwgaramond] [texnansi]
   \definefontsynonym [URWGaramond-Roman]          [texnansi-ugmr8a]  
[encoding=texnansi]
   \definefontsynonym [URWGaramond-Bold]           [texnansi-ugmm8a]  
[encoding=texnansi]
   \definefontsynonym [URWGaramond-Italic]         [texnansi-ugmri8a]  
[encoding=texnansi]
   \definefontsynonym [URWGaramond-Bold-Italic]    [texnansi-ugmmi8a]  
[encoding=texnansi]
  \stoptypescript

\starttypescript [serif] [urwgaramond] [name]
   \usetypescript[serif][fallback]
   \definefontsynonym [Serif]           [URWGaramond-Roman]
   \definefontsynonym [SerifItalic]     [URWGaramond-Italic]
   \definefontsynonym [SerifBold]       [URWGaramond-Bold]
   \definefontsynonym [SerifBoldItalic] [URWGaramond-Bold-Italic]
   \stoptypescript

\starttypescript [URWGaramond]
   \definetypeface [MyURWGaramond] [rm] [serif] [urwgaramond] [default] 
[encoding=texnansi]
\stoptypescript

You can then typeset in the new font:

\usetypescriptfile [type-urwgaramond]

\usetypescript[URWGaramond]

\setupbodyfont[MyURWGaramond,11pt]

\starttext

Hello world!

\stoptext

HTH

Thomas