Re(6): Italic open-o in omega

"Yannis Haralambous" <[email protected]> Sat, 31 May 2003 12:36:58 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.comp.tex.omega.user
Organization ENST Bretagne
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>"YH" =3D=3D Yannis Haralambous writes:
>
> YH> That's exactly what G=E1bor'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?

You are suggesting to convert TrueType/OpenType into big PFB files.
We first thought of that but there is a problem of strategy:

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

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

using PFC is a first step to OpenType migration since PFC tables can be
included in OpenType fonts, whenever this is allowed. So we will do that
already for OpenType versions of Computer Modern fonts.

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

> YH> and there are no ligatures at all in AFM,
>
>well, in fact there are ligatures in the AFM files... simple ones, e.g.
>
>C 62 ; WX 777 ; N greater ; B 84 -29 693 531 ; L greater guillemotright =
;

I know that there is the possibility to write ligatures into AFM, but
afm2tfm does not convert them into TeX ligatures and they seem to be
ignored by all software. And I don't remember when was the last time I
saw such a ligature in a real font. And they are not *smart* ligatures
neither in the TeX sense nor in the OpenType sense.

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