[pdftex] Problem with TrueType fonts - error "Bad metric"

[Taco Hoekwater]

Stefan Ohletz wrote:
> Am I doing anything wrong or is this some known bug of pdftex? Can 
> anyone reproduce this error message with the Helium font I referred to 
> above? To be honest, I don't have a clue what role encodings play when 
> installing font files. Could this be a source of errors, perhaps?

Looks like you found a bug in ttf2afm, because the generated afm file
for Helium had

   XHeight 64960

and that is more than 100 times too much (should be 576). I manually
fixed that line and now it seems fine. It could also be a bug in the
font itself, that ttf2afm does not know how to handle.

The erroneous tfm file turned out to be the 'base font' of the virtual
font that used, which is why you received the error during the final
output stage (where pdftex/dvips have to resolve VFs into actual fonts).

Greetings, Taco