TEX at the End: Omega and Zapfino

William Adams
ATLIS Graphics
willadams@aol.com

Wednesday July 23, 2003

Abstract

The future of type is OpenType (Adobe and Microsoft's successor to Apple's ``Royal'' font technology which was licensed to Microsoft as TrueType), Unicode, and other extensions of TrueType and the Type 1 font format such as ATSUI (Apple Typographic System for Unicode Information). While TEX has been extended to support other new formats and standards such as .pdf, support for the new font formats has been limited at best, and in its most promising incarnation (QuickDraw/GX and TEX/GX) has whithered on the vine as it were.

Fortunately, for Unicode in TEX there is Omega which coupled with the other strengths of TEX can be sufficient to take advantage of new technologies without explicit support with the proper (or improper) techniques.

This paper will be an explanation and exploration of this, looking at a specific font and format (the .dfont ATSUI-enabled version of Zapfino), arguably very nearly a worst-case scenario, and how it can be dissassembled into individual glyphs in .eps format and seamlessly stitched back together as an Omega Virtual Font with a matching Omega Translation Process to automatically insert ligatures and swash and variant forms using ASCII markup in an otherwise ordinary .tex source file which can then be used in a pre-press ready workflow.

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[ slides 1.7 MB ]
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