afm2pl - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

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]

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.

┌───────────────┬───────────────────────┬───────────────────────┐
│Font dimension │ Default value │ Afm2tfm value │
├───────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│stretch │ space div 2 │ 300 × extend_factor │
├───────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│shrink │ space div 3 │ 100 × extend_factor │
├───────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│extra space │ space div 3 │ missing │
├───────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│quad │ 2 × width of ‘0’ │ 1000 × extend_factor │
├───────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│space │ (space source font) × │ (space source font) × │
│ │ extend_factor │ extend_factor │
└───────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┘
For fixed-pitch fonts, different values apply:

┌───────────────┬─────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│Font dimension │ Default value │ Afm2tfm value │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│stretch │ 0 │ 0 │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│shrink │ 0 │ 0 │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│extra space │ space │ missing │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│quad │ 2 × character width │ 1000 × extend_factor │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│space │ character width │ character width │
└───────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

May 2009 AFM2PL(1)

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