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   1  <HTML>
   2  <HEAD>
   3  <TITLE>
   4  TTF2PT1 - A True Type to PostScript Type 1 Converter 
   5  </TITLE>
   6  </HEAD>
   7  <BODY>
   8  <!-- =defdoc t1 ttf2pt1 1 -->
   9  <H2>
  10  <!-- =section t1 NAME -->
  11  TTF2PT1 - A True Type to PostScript Type 1 Font Converter 
  12  <!-- =stop -->
  13  </H2>
  14  
  15  <! 
  16  (Do not edit this file, it is generated from README.html!!!)
  17  >
  18  <TT>
  19  [
  20  <blockquote>
  21  <!-- =section t1 HISTORY -->
  22    Based on ttf2pfa by Andrew Weeks, and help from Frank Siegert.
  23  <BR>
  24    Modification by Mark Heath.
  25  <BR>
  26    Further modification by Sergey Babkin.
  27  <BR>
  28    The Type1 assembler by I. Lee Hetherington with modifications by 
  29    Kai-Uwe Herbing.
  30  <!-- =stop -->
  31  </blockquote>
  32  ]
  33  </TT>
  34  <p>
  35  
  36  Ever wanted to install a particular font on your XServer but only could find 
  37  the font you are after in True Type Format?
  38  <p>
  39  
  40  Ever asked <TT>comp.fonts</TT> for a True Type to Type 1 converter and got a List 
  41  of Commercial software that doesn't run on your Operating System?
  42  <p>
  43  
  44  Well, this program should be the answer.  This program is written in C (so it
  45  should be portable)  and therefore should run on any OS.  The only limitation
  46  is that the program requires some method of converting Big endian integers into
  47  local host integers so the network functions ntohs and ntohl are used. These 
  48  can be replaced by macros if your platform doesn't have them. 
  49  Of course the target platform requires a C compiler and command line ability.
  50  <p>
  51  
  52  <!-- =section t1 DESCRIPTION -->
  53  Ttf2pt1 is a font converter from the True Type format (and some other formats
  54  supported by the FreeType library as well) to the Adobe Type1 format.
  55  <p>
  56  
  57  The versions 3.0 and later got rather extensive post-processing algorithm that 
  58  brings the converted fonts to the requirements of the Type1 standard, tries to
  59  correct the rounding errors introduced during conversions and some simple
  60  kinds of bugs that are typical for the public domain TTF fonts. It
  61  also generates the hints that enable much better rendering of fonts in
  62  small sizes that are typical for the computer displays. But everything
  63  has its price, and some of the optimizations may not work well for certain
  64  fonts. That's why the options were added to the converter, to control
  65  the performed optimizations.
  66  <p>
  67  <!-- =stop -->
  68  
  69  The converter is simple to run, just:
  70  <p>
  71  
  72  <!-- =section t1 SYNOPSIS -->
  73  <blockquote>
  74      <tt>ttf2pt1 <i>[-options] ttffont.ttf [Fontname]</i></tt>
  75  </blockquote>
  76  or
  77  <blockquote>
  78      <tt>ttf2pt1 <i>[-options] ttffont.ttf -</i></tt>
  79  </blockquote>
  80  <!-- =stop -->
  81  <p>
  82  
  83  <!-- =section t1 OPTIONS -->
  84  The first variant creates the file <tt>Fontname.pfa</tt> (or <tt>Fontname.pfb</tt> if the 
  85  option '<b>-b</b>' was used) with the converted font and <tt>Fontname.afm</tt> with the 
  86  font metrics, the second one prints the font or another file (if the option
  87  '<b>-G</b>' was used) on the standard output from where it can be immediately
  88  piped through some filter. If no <tt>Fontname</tt> is specified for the first
  89  variant, the name is generated from <tt>ttffont</tt> by replacing the <tt>.ttf</tt>
  90  filename suffix.
  91  <p>
  92  
  93  Most of the time no options are neccessary (with a possible exception
  94  of '<b>-e</b>'). But if there are some troubles with the resulting font, they 
  95  may be used to control the conversion.
  96  The <B>options</B> are:
  97  <p>
  98  
  99  <!-- ==over 2 -->
 100  <!-- ==item * -->
 101  <TT><B>-a</TT></B> - Include all the glyphs from the source file into the converted
 102     file. If this option is not specified then only the glyphs that have
 103     been assigned some encoding are included, because the rest of glyphs
 104     would be inaccessible anyway and would only consume the disk space. 
 105     But some applications are clever enough to change the encoding on
 106     the fly and thus use the other glyphs, in this case they could
 107     benefit from using this option. But there is a catch: the X11 library
 108     has rather low limit for the font size. Including more glyphs increases
 109     the file size and thus increases the chance of hitting this limit.
 110     See <A HREF="app/X11/README.html"><tt>app/X11/README</tt></A> for the description of a 
 111     patch to X11 which fixes this problem.
 112  <p>
 113  
 114  <!-- ==item * -->
 115  <TT><B>-b</TT></B> - Encode the resulting font to produce a ready <tt>.pfb</tt> file.
 116  <p>
 117  
 118  <!-- ==item * -->
 119  <TT><B>-d <i>suboptions</i></TT></B> - Debugging options. The suboptions are:
 120  <p>
 121  
 122  <blockquote>
 123     <TT><B>a</TT></B> - Print out the absolute coordinates of dots in outlines. Such
 124     a font can not be used by any program (that's why this option is
 125     incompatible with '<b>-e</b>') but it has proven to be a valuable debuging 
 126     information.
 127  <p>
 128  
 129     <TT><B>r</TT></B> - Do not reverse the direction of outlines. The TTF fonts have
 130     the standard direction of outlines opposite to the Type1 fonts. So
 131     they should be reversed during proper conversion. This option
 132     may be used for debugging or to handle a TTF font with wrong
 133     direction of outlines (possibly, converted in a broken way from
 134     a Type1 font). The first signs of the wrong direction are the
 135     letters like "P" or "B" without the unpainted "holes" inside.
 136  <p>
 137  </blockquote>
 138  
 139  <!-- ==item * -->
 140  <TT><B>-e</TT></B> - Assemble the resulting font to produce a ready <tt>.pfa</tt> file.
 141  <I>
 142     [ </I>S.B.<I>: Personally I don't think that this option is particularly useful.
 143     The same result may be achieved by piping the unassembled data
 144     through t1asm, the Type 1 assembler. And, anyways, it's good to
 145     have the t1utils package handy. But Mark and many users think that 
 146     this functionality is good and it took not much time to add this option. ]
 147  </I>
 148  <p>
 149  
 150  <!-- ==item * -->
 151  <TT><B>-F</TT></B> - Force the Unicode encoding: any type of MS encoding specified
 152     in the font is ignored and the font is treated like it has Unicode
 153     encoding. <B>WARNING:</B> <I>this option is intended for buggy fonts
 154     which actually are in Unicode but are marked as something else. The
 155     effect on the other fonts is unpredictable.</I>
 156  <p>
 157  
 158  <!-- ==item * -->
 159  <TT><B>-G <i>suboptions</i></TT></B> - File generation options. The suboptions may be lowercase 
 160     or uppercase, the lowercase ones disable the generation of particular 
 161     files, the corresponding uppercase suboptions enable the generation of the 
 162     same kind of files. If the result of ttf2pt1 is requested to be printed on
 163     the standard output, the last enabling suboption of <b>-G</b> determines
 164     which file will be written to the standard output and the rest of files
 165     will be discarded. For example, <b>-G A</b> will request the AFM file.
 166     The suboptions to disable/enable the generation of the files are:
 167  <p>
 168  
 169  <blockquote>
 170     <TT><B>f/F</TT></B> - The font file. Depending on the other options this file
 171     will have one of the suffixes <tt>.t1a</tt>, <tt>.pfa</tt> or <tt>.pfb</tt>. If the conversion result
 172     is requested on the standard output ('<tt>-</tt>' is used as the output file name)
 173     then the font file will also be written there by default, if not overwritten
 174     by another suboption of <b>-G</b>.
 175     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 176  <p>
 177  
 178     <TT><B>a/A</TT></B> - The Adobe font metrics file (<tt>.afm</tt>).
 179     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 180  <p>
 181  
 182     <TT><B>e/E</TT></B> - The dvips encoding file (<tt>.enc</tt>).
 183     <b>Default: disabled</b>
 184  <p>
 185  
 186  </blockquote>
 187  
 188  <!-- ==item * -->
 189  <TT><B>-l <I>language</I>[+<I>argument</I>]</TT></B> - Extract the fonts for the specified language from a
 190     multi-language Unicode font. If this option is not used the converter
 191     tries to guess the language by the values of the shell variable LANG.
 192     If it is not able to guess the language by LANG it tries all the
 193     languages in the order they are listed. 
 194  <p>
 195  
 196     After the plus sign an optional argument for the language extractor
 197     may be specified. The format of the argument is absolutely up to
 198     the particular language converter. The primary purpose of the
 199     argument is to support selection of planes for the multi-plane
 200     Eastern encodings but it can also be used in any other way. The 
 201     language extractor may decide to add the plane name in some form
 202     to the name of the resulting font. None of the currently supported 
 203     languages make any use of the argument yet.
 204  <p>
 205  
 206     As of now the following languages are supported:
 207  <br>
 208     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>latin1</TT> - for all the languages using the Latin-1 encoding
 209  <br>
 210     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>latin2</TT> - for the Central European languages
 211  <br>
 212     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>latin4</TT> - for the Baltic languages
 213  <br>
 214     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>latin5</TT> - for the Turkish language
 215  <br>
 216     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>cyrillic</TT> - for the languages with Cyrillic alphabet
 217  <br>
 218     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>russian</TT> - historic synonym for cyrillic
 219  <br>
 220     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>bulgarian</TT> - historic synonym for cyrillic
 221  <br>
 222     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>adobestd</TT> - for the AdobeStandard encoding used by TeX
 223  <br>
 224     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>plane+<i>argument</i></TT> - to select one plane from a multi-byte encoding
 225  <p>
 226  
 227     The argument of the "<tt>plane</tt>" language may be in one of three forms:
 228  <p>
 229     &nbsp;&nbsp;<tt>plane+<b>pid=</b><i>&lt;pid&gt;</i><b>,eid=</b><i>&lt;eid&gt;</i></tt>
 230  <br>
 231     &nbsp;&nbsp;<tt>plane+<b>pid=</b><i>&lt;pid&gt;</i><b>,eid=</b><i>&lt;eid&gt;</i><b>,</b><i>&lt;plane_number&gt;</i></tt>
 232  <br>
 233     &nbsp;&nbsp;<tt>plane+<i>&lt;plane_number&gt;</i></tt>
 234  <p>
 235  
 236     Pid (TTF platform id) and eid (TTF encoding id) select a particular 
 237     TTF encoding table in the original font. They are specified as decimal
 238     numbers. If this particular encoding table is not present in the font
 239     file then the conversion fails. The native ("ttf") front-end parser supports
 240     only pid=3 (Windows platform), the FreeType-based ("ft") front-end supports 
 241     any platform. If pid/eid is not specified then the TTF encoding table is 
 242     determined as usual: Unicode encoding if it's first or an 8-bit encoding
 243     if not (and for an 8-bit encoding the plane number is silently ignored). 
 244     To prevent the converter from falling back to an 8-bit encoding, specify
 245     the Unicode pid/eid value explicitly.
 246  <p>
 247  
 248     Plane_number is a hexadecimal (if starts with "<b>0x</b>") or decimal number.
 249     It gives the values of upper bytes for which 256 characters will be 
 250     selected. If not specified, defaults to 0. It is also used as a font
 251     name suffix (the leading "0x" is not included into the suffix).
 252  <p>
 253  
 254  <!-- =stop -->
 255     <B>NOTE:</B>
 256  <!-- =section t1 BUGS -->
 257     It seems that many Eastern fonts use features of the TTF format that are 
 258     not supported by the ttf2pt1's built-in front-end parser. Because of
 259     this for now we recommend using the FreeType-based parser (option
 260     '<b>-p ft</b>') with the "<tt>plane</tt>" language.
 261  <p>
 262  <!-- =stop -->
 263  
 264  <!-- =section t1 OPTIONS -->
 265  <I>
 266     <B>NOTE:</B>
 267     You may notice that the language names are not uniform: some are the
 268     names of particular languages and some are names of encodings. This
 269     is because of the different approaches. The original idea was to
 270     implement a conversion from Unicode to the appropriate Windows
 271     encoding for a given language. And then use the translation tables
 272     to generate the fonts in whatever final encodings are needed. This
 273     would allow to pile together the Unicode fonts and the non-Unicode
 274     Windows fonts for that language and let the program to sort them out
 275     automatically. And then generate fonts in all the possible encodings
 276     for that language. An example of this approach is the Russian language
 277     support. But if there is no multiplicity of encodings used for some 
 278     languages and if the non-Unicode fonts are not considered important 
 279     by the users, another way would be simpler to implement: just provide
 280     only one table for extraction of the target encoding from Unicode
 281     and don't bother with the translation tables. The </I>latin*<I> "languages"
 282     are examples of this approach. If somebody feels that he needs the
 283     Type1 fonts both in Latin-* and Windows encodings he or she is absolutely
 284     welcome to submit the code to implement it.
 285  </I><p>
 286  
 287     <B>WARNING:</B>
 288     Some of the glyphs included into the AdobeStandard encoding are not
 289     included into the Unicode standard. The most typical examples of such
 290     glyphs are ligatures like 'fi', 'fl' etc. Because of this the font 
 291     designers may place them at various places. The converter tries to
 292     do its best, if the glyphs have honest Adobe names and/or are
 293     placed at the same codes as in the Microsoft fonts they will be
 294     picked up. Otherwise a possible solution is to use the option '<b>-L</b>'
 295     with an external map. 
 296  <p>
 297  
 298  <!-- ==item * -->
 299  <TT><B>-L <I>file</I>[+[pid=<I>&lt;pid&gt;</I>,eid=<I>&lt;eid&gt;</I>,][<I>plane</I>]]</TT></B> - Extract the fonts for the specified 
 300     language from a multi-language font using the map from this file. This is
 301     rather like the option '<b>-l</b>' but the encoding map is not 
 302     compiled into the program, it's taken from that file, so it's
 303     easy to edit. Examples of such files are provided in 
 304     <tt>maps/adobe-standard-encoding.map</tt>, <tt>CP1250.map</tt>. (<b>NOTE:</b>
 305     <I>the 'standard encoding' map does not include all the glyphs of the 
 306     AdobeStandard encoding, it's provided only as an example</I>.) The 
 307     description of the supported map formats is in the file 
 308     <tt>maps/unicode-sample.map</tt>.
 309  <p>
 310  
 311     Likewise to '<b>-l</b>', an argument may be specified after the map file
 312     name. But in this case the argument has fixed meaning: it selects the 
 313     original TTF encoding table (the syntax is the same as in '<b>-l plane</b>')
 314     and/or a plane of the map file. The plane name also gets added after dash 
 315     to the font name. The plane is a concept used in the Eastern fonts with big 
 316     number of glyphs: one TTF font gets divided into multiple Type1 fonts, 
 317     each containing one plane of up to 256 glyphs. But with a little 
 318     creativity this concept may be used for other purposes of combining 
 319     multiple translation maps into one file.  To extract multiple planes 
 320     from a TTF font <tt>ttf2pt1</tt> must be run multiple times, each time with 
 321     a different plane name specified.
 322  <p>
 323  
 324     The default original TTF encoding table used for the option '<b>-L</b>' is
 325     Unicode. The map files may include directives to specify different original 
 326     TTF encodings. However if the pid/eid pair is specified with
 327     it overrides any original encoding specified in the map file.
 328  <p>
 329  
 330  <!-- ==item * -->
 331  <TT><B>-m <i>type</i>=<i>value</i></TT></B> - Set maximal or minimal limits of resources.
 332     These limits control the the font generation by limiting the resources
 333     that the font is permitted to require from the PostScript interpreter.
 334     The currently supported types of limits are:
 335  <p>
 336  
 337  <blockquote>
 338     <TT><B>h</TT></B> - the maximal hint stack depth for the substituted hints. 
 339     The default value is 128, according to the limitation in X11. This seems to
 340     be the lowest (and thus the safest) widespread value. To display the
 341     hint stack depth required by each glyph in a <tt>.t1a</tt> file use the script
 342     <tt>scripts/cntstems.pl</tt>.
 343  <p>
 344  </blockquote>
 345  
 346  <!-- ==item * -->
 347  <TT><B>-O <i>suboptions</i></TT></B> - Outline processing options. The suboptions
 348     may be lowercase or uppercase, the lowercase ones disable the features,
 349     the corresponding uppercase suboptions enable the same features.
 350     The suboptions to disable/enable features are:
 351  <p>
 352  
 353  <blockquote>
 354     <TT><B>b/B</TT></B> - Guessing of the ForceBold parameter. This parameter helps
 355     the Type1 engine to rasterize the bold fonts properly at small sizes.
 356     But the algorithm used to guess the proper value of this flag makes
 357     that guess based solely on the font name. In rare cases that may cause
 358     errors, in these cases you may want to disable this guessing. 
 359     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 360  <p>
 361  
 362     <TT><B>h/H</TT></B> - Autogeneration of hints. The really complex outlines
 363     may confuse the algorithm, so theoretically it may be useful
 364     sometimes to disable them. Although up to now it seems that
 365     even bad hints are better than no hints at all.
 366     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 367  <p>
 368  
 369     <TT><B>u/U</TT></B> - Hint substitution. Hint substitution is a technique 
 370     permitting generation of more detailed hints for the rasterizer. It allows 
 371     to use different sets of hints for different parts of a glyph and change 
 372     these sets as neccessary during rasterization (that's why "substituted").  
 373     So it should improve the quality of the fonts rendered at small sizes.  
 374     But there are two catches: First, the X11 library has rather low limit for 
 375     the font size. More detailed hints increase the file size and thus increase 
 376     the chance of hitting this limit (that does not mean that you shall hit it
 377     but you may if your fonts are particularly big). This is especially 
 378     probable for Unicode fonts converted with option '<b>-a</b>', so you may want to 
 379     use '<b>-a</b>' together with '<b>-Ou</b>'. See <A HREF="app/X11/README.html"><tt>app/X11/README</tt></A> for the description of 
 380     a patch to X11 which fixes this problem. Second, some rasterizers (again,
 381     X11 is the typical example) have a limitation for total number of hints
 382     used when drawing a glyph (also known as the hint stack depth). If that
 383     stack overflows the glyph is ignored. Starting from version 3.22 <tt>ttf2pt1</tt>
 384     uses algorithms to minimizing this depth, with the trade-off of slightly
 385     bigger font files. The glyphs which still exceed the limit set by option
 386     '<b>-mh</b>' have all the substituted hints removed and only base hints left.
 387     The algorithms seem to have been refined far enough to make the fonts with
 388     substituted hints look better than the fonts without them or at least the 
 389     same. Still if the original fonts are not well-designed the detailed 
 390     hinting may emphasize the defects of the design, such as non-even thickness 
 391     of lines. So provided that you are not afraid of the X11 bug the best idea 
 392     would be to generate a font with this feature and without it, then compare 
 393     the results using the program <tt>other/cmpf</tt> (see the description 
 394     in <A HREF="other/README.html"><tt>other/README</tt></A>) and decide which one looks better.
 395     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 396  <p>
 397  
 398     <TT><B>o/O</TT></B> - Space optimization of the outlines' code. This kind of optimization
 399     never hurts, and the only reason to disable this feature is for comparison 
 400     of the generated fonts with the fonts generated by the previous versions of 
 401     converter. Well, it _almost_ never hurts. As it turned out there exist
 402     some brain-damaged printers which don't understand it. Actually this
 403     feature does not change the outlines at all. The Type 1 font manual 
 404     provides a set of redundant operators that make font description shorter,
 405     such as '10 hlineto' instead of '0 10 rlineto' to describe a horizontal
 406     line. This feature enables use of these operators.
 407     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 408  <p>
 409  
 410     <TT><B>s/S</TT></B> - Smoothing of outlines. If the font is broken in some
 411     way (even the ones that are not easily noticeable), such smoothing 
 412     may break it further. So disabling this feature is the first thing to be 
 413     tried if some font looks odd. But with smoothing off the hint generation
 414     algorithms may not work properly too.
 415     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 416  <p>
 417  
 418     <TT><B>t/T</TT></B> - Auto-scaling to the 1000x1000 Type1 standard matrix. The
 419     TTF fonts are described in terms of an arbitrary matrix up to
 420     4000x4000. The converted fonts must be scaled to conform to
 421     the Type1 standard. But the scaling introduces additional rounding
 422     errors, so it may be curious sometimes to look at the font in its
 423     original scale.
 424     <b>Default: enabled</b>
 425  <p>
 426  
 427     <TT><B>v/V</TT></B> - Do vectorization on the bitmap fonts. Functionally
 428     "vectorization" is the same thing as "autotracing", a different word is
 429     used purely to differentiate it from the Autotrace library. It tries to
 430     produce nice smooth outlines from bitmaps. This feature is still a work
 431     in progress though the results are already mostly decent.
 432     <b>Default: disabled</b>
 433  <p>
 434  
 435     <TT><B>w/W</TT></B> - Glyphs' width corection. This option is designed to be
 436     used on broken fonts which specify too narrow widths for the 
 437     letters. You can tell that a font can benefit from this option
 438     if you see that the characters are smashed together without
 439     any whitespace between them. This option causes the converter
 440     to set the character widths to the actual width of this character
 441     plus the width of a typical vertical stem. But on the other hand
 442     the well-designed fonts may have characters that look better if
 443     their widths are set slightly narrower. Such well-designed fonts
 444     will benefit from disabling this feature. You may want to convert
 445     a font with and without this feature, compare the results and
 446     select the better one. This feature may be used only on proportional
 447     fonts, it has no effect on the fixed-width fonts.
 448     <b>Default: disabled</b>
 449  <p>
 450  
 451     <TT><B>z/Z</TT></B> - Use the Autotrace library on the bitmap fonts. The results 
 452     are horrible and <b>the use of this option is not recommended</b>. This option is 
 453     present for experimental purposes. It may change or be removed in the
 454     future. The working tracing can be achieved with option <tt><b>-OV</b></tt>.
 455     <b>Default: disabled</b>
 456  <p>
 457  </blockquote>
 458  
 459  <!-- ==item * -->
 460  <TT><B>-p <I>parser_name</I></TT></B> - Use the specified front-end parser to read the font file.
 461     If this option is not used, ttf2pt1 selects the parser automatically based
 462     on the suffix of the font file name, it uses the first parser in its
 463     list that supports this font type. Now two parsers are supported:
 464  <p>
 465  
 466     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>ttf</TT> - built-in parser for the ttf files (suffix <tt>.ttf</tt>)
 467  <br>
 468     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>bdf</TT> - built-in parser for the BDF files (suffix <tt>.bdf</tt>)
 469  <br>
 470     &nbsp;&nbsp;<TT>ft</TT> - parser based on the FreeType-2 library (suffixes <tt>.ttf</tt>,
 471         <tt>.otf</tt>, <tt>.pfa</tt>, <tt>.pfb</tt>)
 472  <p>
 473  
 474     The parser <tt>ft</tt> is <b>NOT</b> linked in by default. See <tt>Makefile</tt>
 475     for instructions how to enable it. We do no support this parser on
 476     Windows: probably it will work but nobody tried and nobody knows how
 477     to build it. 
 478  <p>
 479  
 480     The conversion of the bitmap fonts (such as BDF) is simplistic yet,
 481     producing jagged outlines.  When converting such fonts, it might be 
 482     a good idea to turn off the hint substitution (using option <b>-Ou</b>) 
 483     because the hints produced will be huge but not adding much to the
 484     quality of the fonts.
 485  <p>
 486  
 487  <!-- ==item * -->
 488  <TT><B>-u <I>number</I></TT></B> - Mark the font with this value as its
 489     UniqueID. The UniqueID is used by the printers with the hard disks
 490     to cache the rasterized characters and thus significantly
 491     speed-up the printing. Some of those printers just can't
 492     store the fonts without UniqueID on their disk.The problem
 493     is that the ID is supposed to be unique, as it name says. And
 494     there is no easy way to create a guaranteed unique ID. Adobe specifies
 495     the range 4000000-4999999 for private IDs but still it's difficult
 496     to guarantee the uniqueness within it. So if you don't really need the 
 497     UniqueID don't use it, it's optional. Luckily there are a few millions of 
 498     possible IDs, so the chances of collision are rather low. 
 499     If instead of the number a special value '<tt><b>A</b></tt>' is given
 500     then the converter generates the value of UniqueID automatically,
 501     as a hash of the font name. (<b>NOTE:</b> <i> in the version 3.22 the
 502     algorithm for autogeneration of UniqueID was changed to fit the values
 503     into the Adobe-spacified range. This means that if UniqueIDs were used 
 504     then the printer's cache may need to be flushed before replacing the 
 505     fonts converted by an old version with fonts converted by a newer version</i>).
 506     A simple way to find if any of the fonts in a given directory have
 507     duplicated UniqueIDs is to use the command:
 508  <p>
 509  
 510     <tt>&nbsp;&nbsp;cat *.pf[ab] | grep UniqueID | sort | uniq -c | grep -v ' 1 '</tt>
 511  <p>
 512  
 513     Or if you use <tt>scripts/convert</tt> it will do that for you automatically 
 514     plus it will also give the exact list of files with duplicate UIDs.
 515  <p>
 516  
 517  <!-- ==item * -->
 518  <TT><B>-v <I>size</I></TT></B> - Re-scale the font to get the size of a typical uppercase
 519     letter somewhere around the specified size. Actually, it re-scales
 520     the whole font to get the size of one language-dependent letter to be
 521     at least of the specified size. Now this letter is "A" in all the
 522     supported languages. The size is specified in the points of the
 523     Type 1 coordinate grids, the maximal value is 1000. This is an
 524     experimental option and should be used with caution. It tries to
 525     increase the visible font size for a given point size and thus make
 526     the font more readable. But if overused it may cause the fonts to
 527     look out of scale. As of now the interesting values of size for
 528     this option seem to be located mostly between 600 and 850. This
 529     re-scaling may be quite useful but needs more experience to
 530     understand the balance of its effects.
 531  <p>
 532  
 533  <!-- ==item * -->
 534  <TT><B>-W <i>level</i></TT></B> - Select the verbosity level of the warnings.
 535     Currently the levels from 0 to 4 are supported. Level 0 means no warnings
 536     at all, level 4 means all the possible warnings. The default level is 3.
 537     Other levels may be added in the future, so using the level number 99 is
 538     recommended to get all the possible warnings. Going below level 2 is
 539     not generally recommended because you may miss valuable information about
 540     the problems with the fonts being converted.
 541  <p>
 542  
 543  <!-- ==item * -->
 544  <B>Obsolete option:</B>
 545  <TT><B>-A</TT></B> - Print the font metrics (.afm file) instead of the font on STDOUT.
 546     Use <b>-GA</b> instead.
 547  <p>
 548  
 549  <!-- ==item * -->
 550  <B>Very obsolete option:</B>
 551  <br>
 552     The algorithm that implemented the forced fixed width had major
 553     flaws, so it was disabled. The code is still in the program and
 554     some day it will be refined and returned back. Meanwhile the 
 555     option name '<b>-f</b>' was reused for another option. The old version was:
 556  <br>
 557  <TT><B>-f</TT></B> - Don't try to force the fixed width of font. Normally the converter
 558     considers the fonts in which the glyph width deviates by not more
 559     than 5% as buggy fixed width fonts and forces them to have really
 560     fixed width. If this is undesirable, it can be disabled by this option.
 561  <p>
 562  <!-- ==back -->
 563  
 564  The <tt>.pfa</tt> font format supposes that the description of the characters
 565  is binary encoded and encrypted. This converter does not encode or
 566  encrypt the data by default, you have to specify the option '<b>-e</b>'
 567  or use the <tt>t1asm</tt> program to assemble (that means, encode and
 568  encrypt) the font program. The <tt>t1asm</tt> program that is included with
 569  the converter is actually a part of the <tt>t1utils</tt> package, rather old
 570  version of which may be obtained from
 571  <p>
 572  
 573  <blockquote>
 574  <A HREF="http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/t1utils.tar.gz">
 575      http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/t1utils.tar.gz
 576  </A>
 577  </blockquote>
 578  <p>
 579  
 580  Note that <tt>t1asm</tt> from the old version of that package won't work properly
 581  with the files generated by <tt>ttf2pt1</tt> version 3.20 and later. Please use
 582  <tt>t1asm</tt> packaged with <tt>ttf2pt1</tt> or from the new version <tt>t1utils</tt>
 583  instead. For a newer version of <tt>t1utils</tt> please look at
 584  <p>
 585  
 586  <blockquote>
 587  <A HREF="http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/">
 588      http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/
 589  </A>
 590  </blockquote>
 591  <p>
 592  <!-- =stop -->
 593  
 594  <!-- =section t1 EXAMPLES -->
 595  So, the following command lines:
 596  <p>
 597  
 598  <blockquote>
 599      <tt>ttf2pt1 -e ttffont.ttf t1font</tt>
 600  <br>
 601      <tt>ttf2pt1 ttffont.ttf - | t1asm &gt;t1font.pfa</tt>
 602  </blockquote>
 603  <p>
 604  
 605  represent two ways to get a working font. The benefit of the second form 
 606  is that other filters may be applied to the font between the converter
 607  and assembler.
 608  <p>
 609  <!-- =stop -->
 610  
 611  <H4>
 612  Installation and deinstallation of the converter
 613  </H4>
 614  <!
 615  ------------------------------------------------
 616  >
 617  
 618  The converter may be easily installed systemwide with
 619  
 620  <blockquote>
 621      <tt>make install</tt>
 622  </blockquote>
 623  
 624  and uninstalled with
 625  
 626  <blockquote>
 627      <tt>make uninstall</tt>
 628  </blockquote>
 629  
 630  By default the <tt>Makefile</tt> is configured to install in the hierarchy
 631  of directory <tt>/usr/local</tt>. This destination directory as well as
 632  the structure of the hierarchy may be changed by editing the <tt>Makefile</tt>.
 633  
 634  <H4>
 635  Installation of the fonts
 636  </H4>
 637  <!
 638  -------------------------
 639  >
 640  
 641  Running the converter manually becomes somewhat boring if it has to 
 642  be applied to a few hundreds of fonts and then you have to generate the 
 643  <tt>fonts.scale</tt> and/or <tt>Fontmap</tt> files. The <A HREF="FONTS.html"><tt>FONTS</tt></A> file describes how to use 
 644  the supplied scripts to handle such cases easily. It also discusses
 645  the installation of the fonts for a few widespread programs.
 646  <p>
 647  
 648  <H4>
 649  Other utilities
 650  </H4>
 651  <!
 652  ---------------
 653  >
 654  
 655  A few other small interesting programs that allow a cloase look at
 656  the fonts are located in the subdirectory '<tt>other</tt>'. They
 657  are described shortly in <A HREF="other/README.html">others/README</a>.
 658  <p>
 659  
 660  <H4>
 661  Optional packages
 662  </H4>
 663  <!
 664  -----------------
 665  >
 666  
 667  Some auxiliary files are not needed by everyone and are big enough that
 668  moving them to a separate package speeds up the downloads of the main
 669  package significantly. As of now we have one such optional package:
 670  <p>
 671  
 672  &nbsp;&nbsp;<b>ttf2pt1-chinese</b> - contains the Chinese conversion maps
 673  <p>
 674  
 675  The general versioning policy for the optional packages is the following:
 676  These packages may have no direct dependency on the ttf2pt1 version.
 677  But they may be updated in future, as well as some versions of optional
 678  packages may have dependencies on certain versions of ttf2pt1.
 679  To avoid unneccessary extra releases on one hand and keep the updates in 
 680  sync with the ttf2pt1 itself on the other hand, a new version of an optional 
 681  package will be released only if there are any changes to it and it will be 
 682  given the same version number as ttf2pt1 released at the same time. So not 
 683  every release of ttf2pt1 would have a corresponding release of all optional 
 684  packages. For example, to get the correct version of optional packages for an 
 685  imaginary release 8.3.4 of ttf2pt1 you would need to look for optional 
 686  packages of the highest version not higher than (but possibly equal to) 8.3.4.
 687  <p>
 688  
 689  <H4>
 690  TO DO:
 691  </H4>
 692  <!
 693  ------
 694  >
 695  
 696  <ul>
 697  <li> Improve hinting.
 698  <li> Improve the auto-tracing of bitmaps.
 699  <li> Implement the family-level hints.
 700  <li> Add generation of CID-fonts.
 701  <li> Handle the composite glyphs with relative base points.
 702  <li> Preserve the relative width of stems during scaling to 1000x1000 matrix.
 703  <li> Add support for bitmap TTF fonts.
 704  <li> Implement better support of Asian encodings.
 705  <li> Implement automatic creation of ligatures.
 706  </ul>
 707  
 708  <H4>
 709  TROUBLESHOOTING AND BUG REPORTS
 710  </H4>
 711  <!
 712  -------------------------------
 713  >
 714  <!-- =section t1 BUGS -->
 715  <!-- ==head2 Troubleshooting and bug reports -->
 716  
 717  Have problems with conversion of some font ? The converter dumps core ? Or your
 718  printer refuses to understand the converted fonts ? Or some characters are 
 719  missing ? Or some characters look strange ?
 720  <p>
 721  
 722  Send the bug reports to the ttf2pt1 development mailing list at
 723  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A>.
 724  <p>
 725  
 726  Try to collect more information about the problem and include it into
 727  the bug report. (Of course, even better if you would provide a ready
 728  fix, but just a detailed bug report is also good). Provide detailed
 729  information about your problem, this will speed up the response greatly.
 730  Don't just write "this font looks strange after conversion" but describe
 731  what's exactly wrong with it: for example, what characters look wrong
 732  and what exactly is wrong about their look. Providing a link to the
 733  original font file would be also a good idea. Try to do a little
 734  troublehooting and report its result. This not only would help with
 735  the fix but may also give you a temporary work-around for the bug.
 736  <p>
 737  
 738  First, enable full warnings with option '<b>-W99</b>', save them to
 739  a file and read carefully. Sometimes the prolem is with a not implemented
 740  feature which is reported in the warnings. Still, reporting about such
 741  problems may be a good idea: some features were missed to cut corners,
 742  in hope that no real font is using them. So a report about a font using
 743  such a feature may motivate someone to implement it. Of course, you
 744  may be the most motivated person: after all, you are the one wishing
 745  to convert that font. ;-) Seriously, the philosophy "scrath your own itch"
 746  seems to be the strongest moving force behind the Open Source software.
 747  <p>
 748  
 749  The next step is playing with the options. This serves a dual purpose:
 750  on one hand, it helps to localize the bug, on the other hand you may be
 751  able to get a working version of the font for the meantime while the
 752  bug is being fixed. The typical options to try out are: first '<b>-Ou</b>', if
 753  it does not help then '<b>-Os</b>', then '<b>-Oh</b>', then '<b>-Oo</b>'.
 754  They are described in a bit more detail above. Try them one by one
 755  and in combinations. See if with them the resulting fonts look better.
 756  <p>
 757  
 758  On some fonts ttf2pt1 just crashes. Commonly that happens because the
 759  font being converted is highly defective (although sometimes the bug
 760  is in ttf2pt1 itself). In any case it should not crash, so the reports
 761  about such cases will help to handle these defects properly in future.
 762  <p>
 763  
 764  We try to respond to the bug reports in a timely fashion but alas, this 
 765  may not always be possible, especially if the problem is complex.
 766  This is a volunteer project and its resources are limited. Because
 767  of this we would appreciate bug reports as detailed as possible,
 768  and we would appreciate the ready fixes and contributions even more.
 769  <p>
 770  <!-- =stop -->
 771  <!-- =section t1 FILES -->
 772  <!-- ==over 2 -->
 773  <!-- ==item * -->
 774  <!-- =text TTF2PT1_LIBXDIR/t1asm -->
 775  <!-- ==item * -->
 776  <!-- =text TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/* -->
 777  <!-- ==item * -->
 778  <!-- =text TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/scripts/* -->
 779  <!-- ==item * -->
 780  <!-- =text TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/other/* -->
 781  <!-- ==item * -->
 782  <!-- =text TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/README -->
 783  <!-- ==item * -->
 784  <!-- =text TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/FONTS -->
 785  <!-- ==back -->
 786  <!-- =stop -->
 787  
 788  <H4>
 789  CONTACTS
 790  </H4>
 791  <!
 792  --------
 793  >
 794  <!-- =section t1 SEE ALSO -->
 795  <!-- ==over 4 -->
 796  <!-- ==item * -->
 797  <!-- =text L&lt;ttf2pt1_convert(1)&gt; -->
 798  <!-- ==item * -->
 799  <!-- =text L&lt;ttf2pt1_x2gs(1)&gt; -->
 800  <!-- ==item * -->
 801  <!-- =text L&lt;t1asm(1)&gt; -->
 802  
 803  <!-- ==item * -->
 804  <A HREF="http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-announce">
 805  [email protected]
 806  </A><br>
 807    The mailing list with announcements about ttf2pt1. It is a moderated mailing
 808    with extremely low traffic. Everyone is encouraged to subscribe to keep in 
 809    touch with the current status of project. To subscribe use the Web interface
 810    at <A HREF="http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-announce">http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-announce</A>.
 811    If you have only e-mail access to the Net then send a subscribe request to 
 812    the development mailing list [email protected] and somebody
 813    will help you with subscription.
 814  <p>
 815  
 816  <!-- ==item * -->
 817  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">
 818  [email protected]
 819  </A><br>
 820  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">
 821  [email protected]
 822  </A><br>
 823    The ttf2pt1 mailing lists for development and users issues. They have not
 824    that much traffic either. To subscribe use the Web interface at
 825    <A HREF="http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-devel">http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-devel</A>
 826    and <A HREF="http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-users">http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-users</A>.
 827    If you have only e-mail access to the Net then send a subscribe request to 
 828    the development mailing list [email protected] and somebody
 829    will help you with subscription.
 830  <p>
 831  
 832  <!-- =stop -->
 833  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">
 834  [email protected]
 835  </A><br>
 836    Mark Heath
 837  <p>
 838  
 839  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">
 840  [email protected]
 841  </A><br>
 842    Andrew Weeks
 843  <p>
 844  
 845  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">
 846  [email protected]</A> (preferred)<br>
 847  <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">
 848  [email protected]
 849  </A><br>
 850  <A HREF="http://members.bellatlantic.net/~babkin">
 851  http://members.bellatlantic.net/~babkin
 852  </A><br>
 853    Sergey Babkin
 854  <p>
 855  
 856  <H4>
 857  SEE ALSO
 858  </H4>
 859  <!
 860  --------
 861  >
 862  
 863  <!-- =section t1 SEE ALSO -->
 864  <!-- ==item * -->
 865  <A HREF="http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net">
 866  http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net
 867  </A><br>
 868    The main page of the project.
 869  <p>
 870  
 871  <A HREF="http://www.netspace.net.au/~mheath/ttf2pt1/">
 872  http://www.netspace.net.au/~mheath/ttf2pt1/
 873  </A><br>
 874    The old main page of the project.
 875  <p>
 876  <!-- ==back -->
 877  <!-- =stop -->
 878  
 879  <A HREF="http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32">
 880  http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32
 881  </A><br>
 882    Precompiled binaries for Windows.
 883  <p>
 884  
 885  <A HREF="http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/">
 886  http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/
 887  </a><br>
 888    The home page of the Type 1 utilities package.
 889  <p>
 890  
 891  <A HREF="http://www.rightbrain.com/pages/books.html">
 892  http://www.rightbrain.com/pages/books.html
 893  </a><br>
 894    The first book about PostScript on the Web, "Thinking in PostScript".
 895  <p>
 896  
 897  <A HREF="http://fonts.apple.com/TTRefMan/index.html">
 898  http://fonts.apple.com/TTRefMan/index.html
 899  </a><br>
 900    The True Type reference manual.
 901  <p>
 902  
 903  <A HREF="http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/PLRM.pdf">
 904  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/PLRM.pdf
 905  </a><br>
 906    Adobe PostScript reference manual.
 907  <p>
 908  
 909  <A HREF="http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/T1_SPEC.PDF">
 910  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/T1_SPEC.PDF
 911  </a><br>
 912    Specification of the Type 1 font format.
 913  <p>
 914  
 915  <A HREF="http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5015.Type1_Supp.pdf">
 916  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5015.Type1_Supp.pdf
 917  </a><br>
 918    The Type 1 font format supplement.
 919  <p>
 920  
 921  <A HREF="http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5004.AFM_Spec.pdf">
 922  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5004.AFM_Spec.pdf
 923  </A><BR>
 924    Specification of the Adobe font metrics file format.
 925  <p>
 926  
 927  <A HREF="http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/surface/bez_surf.html">
 928  http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/surface/bez_surf.html
 929  </A><BR>
 930  <A HREF="http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/curves.html">
 931  http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/curves.html
 932  </A><BR>
 933    Information about the Bezier curves.
 934  <p>
 935  
 936  <A HREF="http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ini/PEOPLE/rmz/t1lib/t1lib.html">
 937  http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ini/PEOPLE/rmz/t1lib/t1lib.html
 938  </A><br>
 939    A stand-alone library supporting the Type1 fonts. Is neccessary
 940    to compile the programs <tt>other/cmpf</tt> and <tt>other/dmpf</tt>.
 941  <p>
 942  
 943  <A HREF="http://www.freetype.org">
 944  http://www.freetype.org
 945  </A><br>
 946    A library supporting the TTF fonts. Also many useful TTF programs
 947    are included with it.
 948  <p>
 949  
 950  <A HREF="http://heliotrope.homestead.com/files/printsoft.html">
 951  http://heliotrope.homestead.com/files/printsoft.html
 952  </A><br>
 953    Moses Gold's collection of links to printing software.
 954  <p>
 955  
 956  <A HREF="http://linuxartist.org/fonts/">
 957  http://linuxartist.org/fonts/
 958  </A><br>
 959    Collection of font-related links.
 960  <p>
 961  
 962  <HR>
 963  <HR>
 964  <!
 965  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 966  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 967  >
 968  
 969  Following is the Readme of <tt>ttf2pfa</tt> (true type to type 3 font converter) It 
 970  covers other issues regarding the use of this software. Please note that
 971  although <tt>ttf2pfa</tt> is a public domain software, <tt>ttf2pt1</tt>
 972  is instead covered by an Open Source license. See the <tt>COPYRIGHT</tt>
 973  file for details.
 974  <p>
 975  
 976  Please note also that <tt>ttf2pfa</tt> has not been maintained for a long time.
 977  All of its functionality has been integrated into <tt>ttf2pt1</tt> and all the
 978  development moved to <tt>ttf2pt1</tt>, including Andrew Weeks, the author of
 979  <tt>ttf2pfa</tt>. <tt>Ttf2pfa</tt> is provided for historical reasons only. Please use
 980  <tt>ttf2pt1</tt> instead.
 981  
 982  <HR>
 983  <!
 984  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 985  >
 986  
 987  <H3>
 988  True Type to Postscript Font converter
 989  </H3>
 990  <!
 991  --------------------------------------
 992  >
 993  
 994  My mind is still reeling from the discovery that I was able to write
 995  this program. What it does is it reads a Microsoft TrueType font and
 996  creates a Postscript font. '<I>_A_</I> postscript font', that is, not necessarily
 997  the same font, you understand, but a fair imitation.
 998  <p>
 999  
1000  Run it like this:
1001  <p>
1002  
1003  <blockquote><tt>
1004      ttf2pfa fontfile.ttf fontname
1005  </tt></blockquote>
1006  <p>
1007  
1008  The first parameter is the truetype filename, the second is a stem for
1009  the output file names. The program will create a <tt>fontname.pfa</tt> containing
1010  the Postscript font and a <tt>fontname.afm</tt> containing the metrics.
1011  <p>
1012  
1013  The motivation behind this is that in Linux if you do not have a
1014  Postscript printer, but only some other printer, you can only print
1015  Postscript by using Ghostscript. But the fonts that come with
1016  Ghostscript are very poor (they are converted from bitmaps and look
1017  rather lumpy). This is rather frustrating as the PC running Linux
1018  probably has MS-Windows as well and will therefore have truetype fonts,
1019  but which are quite useless with Linux, X or Ghostscript.
1020  <p>
1021  
1022  The program has been tested on over a hundred different TrueType fonts
1023  from various sources, and seems to work fairly well. The converted
1024  characters look OK, and the program doesn't seem to crash any more. I'm
1025  not sure about the AFM files though, as I have no means to test them.
1026  <p>
1027  
1028  The fonts generated will not work with X, as the font rasterizer that
1029  comes with X only copes with Type 1 fonts. If I have the time I may
1030  modify ttf2pfa to generate Type 1s.
1031  <p>
1032  
1033  <H4>
1034  Copyright issues
1035  </H4>
1036  <!
1037  ----------------
1038  >
1039  
1040  I am putting this program into the public domain, so don't bother
1041  sending me any money, I'd only have to declare it for income tax.
1042  <p>
1043  
1044  Copyright on fonts, however, is a difficult legal question. Any
1045  copyright statements found in a font will be preserved in the output.
1046  Whether you are entitled to translate them at all I don't know.
1047  <p>
1048  
1049  If you have a license to run a software package, like say MS-Windows, on
1050  your PC, then you probably have a right to use any part of it, including
1051  fonts, on that PC, even if not using that package for its intended
1052  purpose.
1053  <p>
1054  
1055  I am not a lawyer, however, so this is not a legal opinion, and may be
1056  garbage.
1057  <p>
1058  
1059  There shouldn't be a any problem with public domain fonts.
1060  <p>
1061  
1062  <H4>
1063  About the Program
1064  </H4>
1065  <!
1066  -----------------
1067  >
1068  
1069  It was written in C on a IBM PC running Linux.
1070  <p>
1071  
1072  The TrueType format was originally developed by Apple for the MAC, which
1073  has opposite endianness to the PC, so to ensure compatibility 16 and 32
1074  bit fields are the wrong way round from the PC's point of view. This is
1075  the reason for all the 'ntohs' and 'ntohl' calls. Doing it this way
1076  means the program will also work on big-endian machines like Suns.
1077  <p>
1078  
1079  I doubt whether it will work on a DOS-based PC though.
1080  <p>
1081  
1082  The program produces what technically are Type 3 rather than Type 1
1083  fonts. They are not compressed or encrypted and are plain text. This is
1084  so I (and you) can see what's going on, and (if you're a Postscript guru
1085  and really want to) can alter the outlines.
1086  <p>
1087  
1088  I only translate the outlines, not the 'instructions' that come with
1089  them. This latter task is probably virtually impossible anyway. TrueType
1090  outlines are B-splines rather than the Bezier curves that Postscript
1091  uses. I believe that my conversion algorithm is reasonably correct, if
1092  nothing else because the characters look right.
1093  <p>
1094  
1095  <H4>
1096  Problems that may occur
1097  </H4>
1098  <!
1099  -----------------------
1100  >
1101  
1102  Most seriously, very complex characters (with lots of outline segments)
1103  can make Ghostscript releases 2.x.x fail with a 'limitcheck' error. It
1104  is possible that this may happen with some older Postscript printers as
1105  well. Such characters will be flagged by the program and there are
1106  basically two things you can do. First is to edit the <tt>.pfa</tt> file to
1107  simplify or remove the offending character. This is not really
1108  recommended. The second is to use Ghostscript release 3, if you can get
1109  it. This has much larger limits and does not seem to have any problems
1110  with complex characters.
1111  <p>
1112  
1113  Then there are buggy fonts (yes, a font can have bugs). I try to deal
1114  with these in as sane a manner as possible, but it's not always
1115  possible.
1116  <p>
1117  
1118  <H4>
1119  Encodings
1120  </H4>
1121  <!
1122  ---------
1123  >
1124  
1125  A postscript font must have a 256 element array, called an encoding,
1126  each element of which is a name, which is also the name of a procedure
1127  contained within the font. The 'BuildChar' command takes a byte and uses
1128  it to index the encoding array to find a character name, and then looks
1129  that up in the font's procedure table find the commands to draw the
1130  glyph. However, not all characters need be in the encoding array. Those
1131  that are not cannot be drawn (at least not using 'show'), however it is
1132  possible to 're-encode' the font to enable these characters. There are
1133  several standard encodings: Adobe's original, ISO-Latin1 and Symbol
1134  being the most commonly encountered.
1135  <p>
1136  
1137  TrueType fonts are organised differently. As well as the glyph
1138  descriptions there are a number of tables. One of these is a mapping
1139  from a character set into the glyph array, and another is a mapping from
1140  the glyph array into a set of Postscript character names. The problems
1141  are:
1142  <p>
1143      1)    Microsoft uses Unicode, a 16-bit system, to encode the font.
1144  <br>
1145      2)    that more than one glyph is given the same Postscript name.
1146  <p>
1147  
1148  I deal with (1) by assuming a Latin1 encoding. The MS-Windows and
1149  Unicode character sets are both supersets of ISO-8859-1. This usually
1150  means that most characters will be properly encoded, but you should be
1151  warned that some software may assume that fonts have an Adobe encoding.
1152  Symbol, or Dingbat, fonts are in fact less of a problem, as they have
1153  private encodings starting at 0xF000. It is easy to just lose the top
1154  byte.
1155  <p>
1156  
1157  Postscript fonts can be re-encoded, either manually, or by software.
1158  Groff, for example, generates postscript that re-encodes fonts with the
1159  Adobe encoding. The problem here is that not all characters in the Adobe
1160  set are in the MS-Windows set. In particular there are no fi and fl
1161  ligatures. This means that conversions of the versions of
1162  Times-New-Roman and Arial that come with MS-Windows cannot be used
1163  blindly as replacements for Adobe Times-Roman and Helvetica. You can get
1164  expanded versions of MS fonts from Microsoft's web site which do contain
1165  these ligatures (and a lot else besides).
1166  <p>
1167  
1168  I deal with (2) by creating new character names. This can be error-prone
1169  because I do not know which of them is the correct glyph to give the
1170  name to. Some (buggy) fonts have large numbers of blank glyphs, all with
1171  the same name.
1172  <p>
1173  
1174  (almost every TrueType font has three glyphs called <tt>.notdef</tt>, one of them
1175  is usually an empty square shape, one has no outline and has zero width,
1176  and one has no outline and a positive width. This example is not really
1177  a problem with well formed fonts since the <tt>.notdef</tt> characters are only
1178  used for unprintable characters, which shouldn't occur in your documents
1179  anyway).
1180  <p>
1181  </BODY>
1182  </HTML>


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