Re: (RSFS) font installation

[mathew <meta@pobox.com>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 04:05, Stefan Müller <warrence.stm@gmx.de> wrote:
> I'm using Windows Vista 64bit and installed the rsfs font by right-clicking
> the .pfm files. I thought I had to use the .pfb files, but Windows did not
> recognize those and didn't show "Install" in the context menu. After
> installing the .pfm files I could find them in "C:\Windows\Fonts".

.pfb is "Printer Font, Binary".
.pfa is "Printer Font, ASCII".
.pfm is Printer Font Metrics, binary.
.afm is Adobe Font Metrics, ASCII.

Typically each font will have a set of outlines in a pfb or pfa file,
and a set of metrics in a pfm or afm file. For Windows, you want the
pfb and pfm files.

> Is this a typo and do you mean .pfm file? Otherwise I don't get it. Should I
> just copy the .pfb files to "C:\Windows\Fonts", too? Did something went
> wrong with installation?

On Windows 7, the OS will identify only the .pfm file as the actual
font. However, when you install the font by opening it and clicking
the "Install" button, Windows invisibly locates the matching .pfb file
from the same directory, and copies them both to the C:\Windows\Fonts
directory.

It then hides the separate files from you. However, you can open the
command line prompt and cd to \windows\fonts and use dir to see them.

> fonts           | names | identifying system font files with suffix otf
> fonts           | names | adding path from OSFONTDIR: c:/windows/fonts
> fonts           | names | adding path from fontconfig file: c:/windows/fonts
>
> in the output, so I guess OSFONTDIR is correct (where would I change it,
> anyway?) as "c:/windows/fonts" is considered.

Yes, looks like it's correct.

You'd change it by setting an environment variable.
http://www.itechtalk.com/thread3595.html

> Here mtxrun tries to identify
> fonts with a number of "suffixes". It only consideres otf, ttf, ttc, dfont
> and afm (and caps versions). Shouldn't there be pfm or pfb as well?

On Linux, it seems to scan for .afm files, as that's what Linux
expects and installs in preference to pfm. I'd expect the Windows
version to scan for .pfm, but I've never run any kind of TeX under
Windows.

To be honest, I did have problems getting LuaTeX and XeTeX to
recognize the PostScript fonts installed with GhostScript, so I
eventually removed them from my font path. My general conclusion is
that life is a lot, lot simpler if you throw away all your Type 1
fonts and replace them with OpenType versions. (I used fontforge to
convert the few that I really wanted to keep.)

Also, if you can find out what TeX is looking for, there are tools to
convert between pfb and pfa, and between afm and pfm.


mathew
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