Re: What's the relationship between vfs and tfms?

[Werner Lemberg <sx0005@sx2.hrz.uni-dortmund.de>]

On Sat, 29 Nov 1997, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:

>    >That VF file gives the name of the `real' font and says how to
>    >rearrange the characters in the `real' font.  It then looks for that
>    >real font.  If it is a `PS' font it will be listed in psfonts.map.
> 
>    This makes the not necessarily valid assumption that you're using DVIPS.
> 
> Oh?  That *is* what we are talking about isn't it?  Do you know another
> implementation that works this way?

I think that all PS TeX tools will check psfonts.map; so do pstopk and
gsftopk which are e.g. called by xdvi to do the job.

>    Anyway, the actual encoding the real live Type 1 printer fount file uses
>    can be pretty much anything, and this varies according to computer.  It
> 
> Well, for text fonts, the actual font file *always* says Adobe Standard
> Encoding.  And yes, you never want to use that.  So you *do* have to
> reencode the font anyway.  Which was my point.  If you have to reencode
> it anyway, why bother with an additional shuffling of character codes?

At least Type 1 fonts have only one encoding. CID PS fonts and TTF fonts
can have any number of encodings...

>    but Unicode encoding will become quite common some time soon.
> 
> Well it is there right now in Windows NT with both TrueType and Type 1 fonts
> (using ATM 4.0 for NT).  I can see all the popluated parts of Lucida Latin
> fonts in `Character Map' e.g. Unfortunately there is very little software that
> can take advantage of it yet.

Unicode is quite useless for TeX. Omega is a different story.


    Werner