afm2pl
convert AFM font metrics to TeX pl font metrics
Synopsis
afm2pl
[-p encoding_file]
[-o]
[-e extension_factor]
[-s slant_factor]
[-f font_dimensions]
[-k]
[-m letter_spacing]
[-l ligkern_spec]
[-L ligkern_spec] [-n]
input_file[.afm] [output_file[.pl]]
afm2pl
[--help] | [--version]
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examples
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description
afm2pl converts
an afm (Adobe Font Metric) file into a pl (Property List)
file, which in its turn can be converted to a tfm (TeX Font
Metric) file. It normally preserves kerns and ligatures, but
also offers additional control over them.
afm2pl is meant
to be a partial replacement for afm2tfm, on which it is
based. With afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is
possible only in a roundabout way, and handling of them is
hard-wired.
For text fonts,
Y&Y´s texnansi is a good encoding to be used with
afm2pl. Its character set includes all the accented
characters likely to be needed for Western languages, plus
many typographic symbols, without a need for either virtual
fonts or a separate text companion font.
Full LaTeX
support for this encoding is available in the form of the
texnansi package, which is already part of TeX Live and
teTeX. These distributions also contain the encoding file
texnansi.enc.
The
distribution contains uppercased and lowercased versions of
texnansi, viz. texnanuc and texnanlc, to allow
font-based rather than macro-based uppercasing
and lowercasing, and the familiar old ot1 encoding plus some
variations in PostScript .enc format (I included these
because they seem to be absent from teTeX/TeX Live).
However, check your mapfiles if you have old
afm2pl-generated fonts using these.
Return value: 0
if no error; a negative number indicating the number of
missing glyphs if conversion was otherwise successfull but
glyphs are missing, and 1 in case of error.
options
-p
encoding_file
The default is the encoding
specified in the afm file, which had better match the
encoding in the fontfile (pfa or pfb). If
afm2pl-name.enc exists, afm2pl will use this file
instead of name.enc, unless an option -n is given. The
generated mapfile entry (see below) instructs pdftex or the
dvi driver to reencode the font on the fly.
On-the-fly reencoding does not require virtual
fonts.
-o
Use octal for all character
codes in the pl file.
-e
extend_factor
Widen or narrow characters by
extend_factor. Default is 1.0 (natural width). Not
recommended[1].
-s
slant_factor
Oblique (slant) characters by
slant_factor. Not recommended either.
-f
font_dimensions
The value is either the keyword
afm2tfm or a comma-separated list of up to five
integers. The parameters are listed below, with their
defaults and their value when the afm2tfm keyword is
specified. ’Space’ means the width of a space in
the target font, except of course in the last row. Keep in
mind that the design size is 1000, and that all numbers must
be nonnegative integers.
For fixed-pitch fonts,
different values apply:
Specify just a
non-default stretch and shrink with e.g. 150,70 and
just a non-default extra space with ,,10.
-k
Keep original ligatures. This
option only has effect in combination with positive
letterspacing; see the section on letterspacing and extra
ligkern info.
-m
letter_spacing
Letterspace by
letter_spacing/1000 em (integer). This is useful for
making all-caps typesetting look better. Try a value
of e.g. 50 or 100. But see the section on letterspacing and
extra ligkern info for details. A better alternative,
though, is letting pdftex do the letterspacing. The
microtype package gives LaTeX users access to this
feature.
-l
ligkern_spec, -L ligkern_spec
See the section on extra
ligkern info for details.
-n
No prefix. For .enc- and
.lig files, the program normally first prefixes the name
with ’afm2pl-´. Only if the prefixed
filename is not found, will it search for the original
filename. This option prevents searching for the prefixed
filename.
-V
Verbose. If turned on, it
reports the number of missing glyphs to stderr and their
names to stdout.
--help
Display a short usage
message.
--version
Display the version number of
afm2pl.
afm2pl- fontinst and artificial smallcaps
Afm2pl doesn´t do virtual fonts. That means that for things such
as artificial smallcaps you have to turn elsewhere, e.g. to the
fontinst package, which is part of any mainstream TeX
distribution.
Look under texmf/tex/fontinst for fontinst support files, which
allow you to generate a smallcaps font (tfm and vf files) from an
afm2pl-generated tfm file. This package only supports texnansi
encoding.
There should be no real problem in doing the same for OT1
encoding. However, there are several variations of the OT1
encoding to take care of. Also, there are as far as I know no
officially sanctioned PostScript names for all the variations of
the OT1 encoding; the fontinst names contain spaces and are
therefore not useable as PostScript names.
changed in version 0 7 1
In order to avoid name conflicts, the .enc- and .lig files
distributed with afm2pl got afm2pl- prepended to their name. The
program itself now first searches for the thus prepended name. If
the .enc- or .lig file is not found it will look for the original
filename. The renaming of the afm2pl .enc files may require
modification of some mapfiles.
extra ligkern info
Most users are well-advised to leave this mess alone and to
accept the default behavior.
The ligatures and kerns present in the afm file can be modified
in various ways. Default, the encoding file is scanned for extra
ligkern specifications, whose format will be described below. If
there are no ligkern specifications in the encoding file, then
extra ligkern specifications will be read from a file
[afm2pl-]default.lig. A value of 0 for ligkern_spec means
that the ligatures and kerns from the afm file won´t be tampered
with and a value of 1 specifies default behavior. One can also
specify a comma-separated list of files with extra ligkerns
specs.
If afm2pl is compiled with the kpathsea library, then these files
will be searched for under $TEXMF/fonts/lig.
Note that ligatures and kerns are hints for the typesetting
application; there is no need to download this information to the
printer or to make it available to a dvi driver.
The parser for ligkern info has been inherited from afm2tfm
virtually without change. A ligkern specification can have one of
the following forms:
glyph_name1 glyph_name2 lig_op glyph_name3 ;
This specifies a ligature. Possible values for lig_op are
=:, |=:, |=:>, =:|, =:|>, |=:|, |=:|> and |=:|>>.
These correspond to LIG, /LIG, /LIG>, LIG/, LIG/>, /LIG/,
/LIG/>, /LIG/>> in .pl syntax; see the pltotf
documentation and the .lig files in the distribution.
glyph_name1 <> glyph_name2 ;
Kern glyph_name1 as glyph_name2.
glyph_name1 {} glyph_name2 ;
Remove the kern between glyph_name1 and
glyph_name2. A value of * for either glyph name is
interpreted as a wildcard.
|| = glyph ;
Set the (right) boundary character to glyph. glyph
may be either a glyphname or a slot in the encoding vector.
Choosing a glyph which doesn´t occur in the output encoding is
equivalent to not specifying a boundarychar at all. It is ok to
pick an encoded glyphname which does not occur in the afm. In
fact, this is what default.lig does: || = cwm ;.
You can copy the kerns of an unencoded character to the
boundarychar. Below, space is the unencoded character:
|| <> space ;
This ligkern specification should occur before the one that
deletes space kerns.
A ligkern specification should be contained within one line. One
line may contain several ligkern specifications, separated by
spaces. Note that ; (space followed by semicolon) is considered
part of the ligkern specification. See the lig files included in
this distribution. Example:
one {} * ; * {} one ; two {} * ; * {} two ;
Lines with ligkern specifications inside an encoding file should
start with % LIGKERN. Ligkern specifications in a lig file may
optionally start this way.
font-based upper- and lowercasing
The distribution includes encoding vectors texnanuc.enc and
texnanlc.enc which produce all-uppercase and all-lowercase fonts
The principal uses for an all-uppercase font are page headers and
section heads. If these contain math, then macro-based
uppercasing would create unpleasant complications. Example:
afm2pl -p texnanuc ptmr8a ptmup8y
pltotf ptmup8y
For best results, you should add some letterspacing. In LaTeX,
this is best done with the microtype package; see the
documentation of that package. But it can also be done with
afm2pl:
afm2pl -p texnanuc -m 100 ptmr8a ptmup8y
This requires caution; see above.
You can use this new font within the context of LaTeX font
selection as follows:
<preamble commands>
\makeatletter
{\nfss@catcodes
\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{ptm}{m}{upp}{<-> ptmup8y}{}}
\makeatother
...
\begin{document}
...
{\fontshape{upp}\selectfont uppercase text}
Note that upp is simply a newly made-up shape name.
The sz ligature ß
Note that the texnanuc encoding provides no glyph for the sz
ligature ß; you´ll either have to substitute ss or provide a
macro-based solution. The following code uses either the usual
glyph or substitutes the letters ss, depending on whether the
glyph exists in the current font:
\def\ss{%
\setbox0\hbox{\char25}%
\ifnum\wd0=0 ss\else\box0\fi
}
In LaTeX, this code appears to work well enough, although on
occasion you may need to insert \protect. A better solution might
involve the sixth parameter of the \DeclareFontShape macro, but I
failed to get that to work.
letterspacing and extra ligkern info
Letterspacing has various side-effects for ligkern info. Instead
of simply applying the extra ligkern info (see previous section),
the following is done:
1. In case of positive letterspacing, native ligatures are
removed, unless the -k option is specified.
2. Extra ligkern info is applied as usual, except that in case of
positive letterspacing different defaults apply: -l 0 is quietly
ignored, ligkern comments in the encoding file are ignored, and
defpre.lig is read instead of default.lig.
3. Letterspacing is applied. This adds a lot of kerns, and
modifies existing kerns.
4. The extra ligkern info specified with -L is applied. The only
ligkern specs which are allowed here, are removals of kerning
pairs (with the {} operator). Values 0 and 1 have a similar
meaning as for the -l parameter. The tfm format has room for
only about 180x180 ligatures and kerning pairs. This is
enough for OT1 encoding, but for texnansi encoding quite a few
ligkern specifications have to be removed. The pltotf program
will remove all ligkern info if too many ligatures and
kerns remain. The default lig file is defpost.lig. This file
throws out kerning pairs which are unlikely to be involved in
letterspacing, such as kerns involving accents or kerns with a
punctuation character or right bracket at the left. It does not
add letterspacing kerns involving boundarychars. Instead,
fontspace is increased by twice the letterspacing. defpost.lig
throws out enough kerns in case of texnansi encoding. With other
encodings, you may have to throw out additional kerning pairs.
mapfile entries
afm2pl writes a mapfile entry to a file with the same basename as
the pl output file, but with extension .map. It can be used for
the dvips mapfile and for the pdftex mapfile. It is assumed that
the pfb file has the same basename as the afm file and must be
downloaded. You may have to hand-edit this entry.
You can configure dvips and pdftex to read this additional
mapfile or otherwise add the entry to an existing mapfile.
Check your mapfiles! To reduce the likelihood of name
conflicts, the .enc- files which are part of afm2pl (ot1, ot1csc,
ot1ital, ot1tt, texnanlc and texnanuc) have now been prepended
with afm2pl-. The .enc files are referenced in mapfiles. If you
have old afm2pl-generated .tfm files using these, then you should
update their mapfile fragments and rerun updmap or updmap-sys. Or
you can copy the relevant enc files to your personal or local
texmf tree under their previous non-prefixed names.
notes
1.
Except that arguably a narrowed Courier is less jarring than a
full-width Courier, when used in combination with a normal
proportional font. For Courier, choose .833 to match the width of
cmtt. Better yet, don’t use Courier at all; most TeX
distributions offer various good replacements.
2.
Font installation the shallow way
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb27-1/tb86kroonenberg-fonts.pdf
3.
TUGboat
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/
urls
The afm2pl homepage is http://tex.aanhet.net/afm2pl/.
The paper Font installation the shallow way[2] (EuroTeX
2006 Proceedings, published as TUGboat[3] issue 27.1)
illustrates the use of afm2pl.