Re: Re(2): Italic open-o in omega

On Saturday 31 May 2003 13:19, you wrote:
> That's very kind of you. In fact there are two independant tasks:
> adapting Omega to OpenType, and completing the font design project.
>
> Actually we have designed the Latin part (including IPA) for all
> styles (roman, italic, bold, bold italic). I can send you big PFB
> files containing these glyphs but I don't have the time right now to
> build an OVP file out of them. Do you want these PFB files? The
> problem is that since these files we still change in the near future,
> if we start distributing them widely people will end up with $n$
> different versions of the same fonts...

I'm sorry if I've offended you. Of course, it could be interesting
to look at these PFB files, but I'm not planning to use them
right now. There are many other large Type1 fonts, for example,
gnu-ghostscript fonts, which already include Latin1 and Latin2
characters. There are also extended versions with Cyrillic glyphs 
and a Greek version of Bookman (called kerkis). Is it possible to
install these fonts for Omega without breaking them to smaller 
pfb files?

> Cyrillic italics are still missing.

I don't understand, why. The glyphs itself were drawn for a
long time; why they are still not available for use?

> >Well, but this means we have to create several *.pfb files from one
> >large ttf? First, I'm unsure if such an operation is always possible
> >due to the license restrictions. Second, which encodings should we
> >use for these pfb files, if we want:
> >
> >a) to preserve kerning information containing in the original font;
> >
> >b) to preserve all specific characters not present in standard 8-bit
> >codepages?
>
> The new odvips (patched by Gábor Bella) reads PFC files, which are
> obtained from TrueType and OpenType fonts. Encodings are not a
> problem if you stick to glyph names as specified by Adobe.

That's very well, but is it possible to avoid creating virtual
fonts by hand? I've created an extension for fontinst which
allows to create Unicode virtual fonts for omega (see 
fonts/utilities/fontinst-contrib/ofntinst), but it still requires
8-bit afm files. If it is possible to install large Type1 fonts
directly, I'll try to modify my extension (or even fontinst
itself) in order to make it compatible with such files.
Just tell me if (and how) it is possible...