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Re: http://www.YandY.com/usely1.htm (and when you shouldn't).



Louis Vosloo  <support@YandY.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Meantime, I'd recommend that, when using Adobe fonts in particular,
>>>>>>> you avoid all this unneccessary complexity and just get TFMs from
>>>>>>> http://www.YandY.com/usely1.htm
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> No hassles with fontinst.  No need for VF.  No charge.  A single
>>>>>>> TFM file complete with ligatures and kerning!  Access to all
>>>>>>> characters in the Adobe text fonts.

A significant reason not to use LY1 is that it makes bad PDF. PDF files
using the LY1 encoding don't view properly on the Macintosh Acrobug
reader -- sure, that's Adobe's fault, but since I've seen Y&Y claim that
their encoding works around these bugs, I think it's important to point
out that this is false. (The 8r/TeXBase1 encoding is similarly flawed
however).

Y&Y's viewpoint reflects their market -- Windows. While their efforts
at public service in releasing the LY1 encoding are laudable, their
efforts are clearly `not ready for prime time' -- one needs only to look
at their LY1 package for Unix, which has text files with DOS control
codes in them, to see that they're not adequately checking their work
on other platforms.

I'm not so much critisizing Y&Y here, but I'd be very pleased to see an
encoding which worked properly with the Acrobat readers on all platforms
and worked if used directly in TeX. (I use the PDFDocEncoding to make
usable PDF, but TeX doesn't like it much because quotation marks aren't
where they should be and the hyphenation patterns don't quite match).

Of course, if Adobe would fix their buggy software, these issues would
disappear overnight, so I can't entirely blame Y&Y, I just don't like
their making false claims.

> [...] I could explain AFMtoTFM to you in one minute.  To make those
> 2229 TFM files, for example, I basically just did
>
>     AFMtoTFM -vadx -FGL -c=texnansi *.afm
>
> And went away to have a cup of coffee.  Eleven minutes later I had
> 2229 TFM files.

Yes, but how useful are these TFMs? What about those of us who have
expert set fonts? Under Y&Y's `no-virtual-fonts' scheme, supporting
`ff', `ffi' and `ffl' ligatures and old-style numerals requires that
users edit/merge their type 1 fonts to make a single unified font that
has all the glyphs they'll use, which may not be possible, desirable,
or legal.

In summary, LY1 causes non-portable PDF, and Y&Y's font tools don't
provide an adequate solution for many users. However, if you have simple
font requirements, only work under DOS/Windows, and don't care about
document portability, their scheme provides a wonderful simplfication
of the complex world of fonts and typography.

    Melissa.
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