Re: Re(4): Italic open-o in omega

On Saturday 31 May 2003 14:03, you wrote:
>
> 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

And what about kerning information? Is it preserved for those
glyphs which found themselves in different pfb files?
And the most interesting question: how can I convert a
pfb or ttf file to this PFC format?

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

Where can I find this makeovp.pl? Such an utility was
described in one of your old articles, but I couldn't
find it at the location you mentioned.

> >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.

There are a lot of things which I can do with fontinst.
For example, I can create a font with faked small capitals, 
build accented characters and so on. Does makeovp
know how to do all these jobs?

> 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?

Really AFM format allows to include ligatures. However, I don't 
know any programs which understand and use this information.