Re: truetype and tex?

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 01:03 PM 98/11/03 -0500, Karl Berry wrote:

>Sorry if this is a faq, but I noticed that Microsoft is offering some
>decent TrueType fonts these days, some done by Matthew Carter:
>http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm

>... and I'm wondering if there's any way to use them with TeX.  That is,
>get usable TFM's out of them somehow, and then either rasterize them
>into PK fonts or convert them into Type 1's?

Well in the case of PS level 2 devices, you can wrap TTF files in some
boiler plate PS code to create `Type 42' fonts, which conssist 
mostly of PS strings containing the actual TT font.  There should
be some utilities around for doing that part.  It is what some
printer drivers on Mac and Windows do when you use TT fonts
when printing to a PS level 2 device.  The Type 42 format is described
in a technical report on the Adobe site.

One interesting point is that most of the MS fonts these days have a 
large glyph complement (typically WGL4 of about 665 characters) which
you won't be able to easily access from a PostScript world.

>The only thing I could find on the web was a Mac program Font Hopper at:
>http://www.btinternet.com/~whoami/macutils.html
>But that won't help with the TFM's ...

Well,  TeX systems that support scalable outline fonts directly have
a way of reading the metrics from the operating system and dumping
them out in TFM format.  But you said you didn't want to shell out for
one of those :-)  Maybe the utilities for creating bitmaps from TTF include
tools for getting the metrics.

Regards, Berthold.


Berthold K.P. Horn
Cambridge, MA		mailto:bkph@ai.mit.edu