From: André W. <wo...@us...> - 2011-12-08 23:45:28
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Hi Michael, Am 07.12.2011 um 23:45 schrieb Michael J Gruber: > Wow, that is quite some news. What does this mean for commercial fonts > which are sold without the afm, but specifically to be used with TeX? > MTPro2 is meant to produce high quality type setting with LaTeX, and is > used by some journals, for example. Technically a Type1 font without an AFM file is incomplete. (There is a very, very old and awfully bad alternative called PFM font metric; in case you have this one, there is the possibility to extract the date from that too.) Also it might be, that all the information is available from the description part of the PFB file too. Some part of this generic font information is repeated in the PFB, but the proper source for this information is the AFM font metric. You should not need to parse the PFB at all to use the font, even though this is practially done all the time in order to strip off unused glyphs from the font when embedding a font. As far as I can see (http://foundry.supelec.fr/gf/project/pdftex/scmsvn/?action=browse&path=%2Fbranches%2Fstable%2Fsource%2Fsrc%2Ftexk%2Fweb2c%2Fpdftexdir%2Fwritefont.c&view=markup) the current pdfTeX source still has the code for doing an educated guess to extract the missing data using the font itself. It does strange things like using the size of the dot (".") as the value for StemV. Just like PyX does. I actually took all the ideas from pdfTeX. In some previous versions of PyX I even used part of the pdftex code directly within PyX. However, if you provide this data in an afm file, PyX will use it whereas pdftex does not. I just tried it using 1.40.12 from TeX Live 2011. However, all those metadata about the font will likely be ignored anyway, even though it is required according to the spec. As far as I understand this data would be important, if the font would not be embedded in the PDF and is not available on the system when viewing/printing the PDF. Than a font replacement might be done using a different font fitting those global font features best. Best, André -- by _ _ _ Dr. André Wobst, Amselweg 22, 85716 Unterschleißheim / \ \ / ) wo...@us..., http://www.wobsta.de/ / _ \ \/\/ / PyX - High quality PostScript and PDF figures (_/ \_)_/\_/ with Python & TeX: visit http://pyx.sourceforge.net/ |