Re(4): Italic open-o in omega

>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?

That's exactly what Gábor's odvips does: it generates the small PFB files
on the fly. PFC files (which are actually charstring1 glyph containers
with a SFNT structure) can easily be produced also from type 1 fonts.
this essentially means that we forget the encoding and we treat all
glyphs the same weither they previously were hidden or not

>
>> 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?

we are re-designing the whole set of glyphs. The Latin glyphs are all
new, and the Cyrillic and Greek ones have to be re-designed to fit with
the Latin ones.

>> 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? 

launching makeovp.pl is not exactly what I would call "doing something
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...

today Perl is widely accessible, I don't see why one should use TeX
as a font conversion utility. 

As a first step we will have big AFM files together with PFC. But this
is only as long as Omega/odvips do not read OpenType information directly.
Otherwise the kerning information in AFM is really simplistic compared to
what you have in OpenType, and there are no ligatures at all in AFM, so
why go through that format in the first place?

We should rather invest our energy in making the OpenType migration as
efficient as possible. Anish has written a proposal on how to store the
TFM information into OpenType fonts, it would be nice if we could discuss 
that.

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| Yannis Haralambous, Ph.D.      yannis.haralambous@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
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