Re: [Groff] Musings on the adding of fonts

[P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 03:48 a.m. 27/02/2002 +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > the font, you need a dedicated tool to get at it. The best procedure to
> > obtain the needed AFM metrics file from a truetype font is to either use
> > ttf2afm (part of the ttf2pk utilities set) [...]
>
> This is not correct.  ttf2afm is part of pdftex.


Is it? I remember having seen in the contrib directory of freetype 1.x.


> This is not correct either.  For printing, using TT fonts at high
> resolutions the results are equal to Type 1.  Don't intermix this with
> screen fonts!  The TT hinting technology is indeed very complicated,
> and only recently proper tools (e.g.Microsoft's VOLT) have appeared to
> manage this easily.  But Type 1 fonts often sucks too at very low
> resolutions -- all the work is delayed to the rasterizer, and the few
> hints in a Type 1 font are by far not sufficient to resolve all
> issues.

I agree with you on this, I was too quick to express an opinion, but I 
stand by my perception that botching the hinting of a TrueType font, in a 
way that even affects high resolution printing is very easy. And I've seen 
some serious cases of such behavior already, particularly when embedding 
type42 fonts in high resolution PDFs---not with high quality TT fonts, but 
with freeware or shareware cooked up in Fontographer..

While not as good at low resolution, type1 hinting is easier to fix (can be 
done by hand with a dissasembler!!!), if using anti-aliasing can give 
better results on screen that a TrueType of similar quality and at high 
resolution output, the rasterization is not only faster but faster, as the 
rendering takes less memory. Well, I the latter is irrelevant unless you 
are using a postscript printer or a high resolution postscript RIP.

> You haven't apparently seen pfaedit's recent additions: It now
> contains a scripting language (using pfaedit as a batch processor
> without screen output) for exactly such things.

When it comes to UNIX I am a console/data processing type guy. I haven't 
touched X/Motif in years nor the new windows managers/desktops :) But it is 
great to know that finally UNIX has a font editing tool in the same quality 
category as RoboFOG.


--
Alejandro López-Valencia
http://dradul.tripod.com/
[...] every cultured man is a theologician, and to be so
faith isn't needed. (J.L. Borges)