Re: Re(6): Italic open-o in omega

"YH" == Yannis Haralambous writes:

 YH> That's exactly what Gábor's odvips does: it generates the small
 YH> PFB files on the fly.
 >> maybe it's not necessary, and one can instead reencode the big
 >> PFB font to several encodings, i.e. create several .enc files, and
 >> put all re-encoded fonts into .map file?

 YH> You are suggesting to convert TrueType/OpenType into big PFB
 YH> files.

in fact, my reply was not related to TrueType/OpenType, but rather to Type1.
you wrote:

> 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 ...

and Alexej Kryukov replied:

> Is it possible to install these fonts for Omega without breaking
> them to smaller pfb files?

then you wrote:

> That's exactly what Gábor's odvips does: it generates the small
> PFB files on the fly.

so i was talking that it's not necessary to break big PFB fonts into
smaller ones on the fly: it is sufficient, and better, to create
several *.enc files and a *.map file which reencodes the big PFB file
into several 256-character encodings.

 YH> We first thought of that but there is a problem of strategy:

 YH> Converting an arbitrary commercial TrueType/OpenType font into
 YH> PFB may be considered as violation of license. But PFC is not
 YH> immediately useable as such, it is only used to produce temporary
 YH> PFB files on-the-fly for immediate printing or PDF production.

i think that it is not a good approach to translate TrueType/OpenType
fonts to Type1 (even on the fly), since it will reduce the quality of
TrueType fonts. it is much better to use Type42 fonts in (o)dvips.

Type42 fonts are directly produceable from TrueType/OpenType, and vise
versa, without any loss of quality (hinting, etc) - Type42 preserves
ALL features of TrueType fonts.

currently, dvips is capable of handling Type42 fonts, but it cannot
currently do partial font embedding of Type42 fonts.

maybe, odvips can be changed in such a way that it's able to work
directly with big type1 or type42 fonts, withour requiring to
re-encode the font to several font encodings...

 YH> Furthermore, for non-commercial fonts, we can include the PFC
 YH> data in the OpenType structure and obtain "enriched" fonts which
 YH> contain the same glyphs in both glyf or CFF, and charstring 1.

but adding something to the commercial TrueType/OpenType fonts may
again be considered as a violation of license. so it seems better to
store all Omega-related additional info in separate files (like ofm,
ovf, etc).

 YH> Imagine that in OpenType fonts you can put italic, roman and
 YH> small-caps into the same font and distinguish them by
 YH> "properties". This means that you can have kerning between all of
 YH> them... no need for the \/ macro anymore since we stay in the
 YH> same font when we write "\emph{and})"...  And these OpenType
 YH> Computer Modern fonts will be useable by other software as well,
 YH> such as InDesign

sounds promising, but in my opinion, all Omega-specific font metric is
better kept in separate files... that will give more flexibility:
Omega will deal only with font metric files, just as TeX does - it
doesn't need to know glyph shapes. Then, these metric files can be
combined with virtual fonts to give arbitrarily complex font usage.

Best,
v.