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type1 version of ibycus polytonic greek
A Type1 version of the Ibycus Greek font (regular weight only) is
available on orhan.classics.washington.edu, in the directory
/ftp/pub/tex. The files are bundled into either psibycus.tgz
or psibycus.zip, to suit the convenience of both the elect and the
infidel. This is a preliminary release, because the font is still
largely unhinted. I will ultimately provide a rather thorough
set of hints, since the primary purpose for making up this font
was to get away from the crude bitmap scaling that is all you
can get out of PDF readers. Hinting, however, is even worse than
filing matrices. It is a soul-destroying bore, and I cannot do
very much of it at any given session. The absence of hints will
not be noticed at resolutions of 600dpi and above. The font has a
private UniqueID in the open range for now, but a registered
UniqueID will be applied for.
The original METAFONT realization of ibycus4 remains the controlling
form of the font. The TeX user will see absolutely no difference
in the set-widths of the Type1 font because the TFM file for it is
exactly the same as the TFM file for the METAFONT version. (In a
Unix environment, they could be joined by hard or symbolic links.)
The Type1 control points have been derived from METAFONT log output
generated by "tracingspecs". This is not impossible, as has sometimes
been claimed, but it does take work.
The bundle consists of:
1. IbycusHTG-Regular.pfa ( = fibr.pfa = IBYHTGR_.PFB ).
The character designs are Silvio Levi's. Some small differences
in accent positioning and vertical positioning on the classic
METAFONT typeface grid have been allowed. My own lowercase lunate
sigma has been improved. These changes will ultimately be read
back into the ibycus4 METAFONT source.
2. fibr.tfm (identical with fibr84.tfm). The use of the Type1 font
is specified by calling on fibr, rather than fibr84. Obliqued and
bold versions of the font are still exclusively METAFONT.
They will continue to be invoked as fibo84[89]? and fibb84[89]?
until I make up Type1 versions of them (if I ever do).
3. fibr.vf, which serves to provide a reference into a dvips map
file. The raw TFM for this VF file is fibr84.tfm, which has the
interesting effect of making METAFONT generated PK files a
fail-safe alternative when the dvips map lookup fails.
The checksums for fibr.tfm fibr84.tfm and fibr.vf are identical.
This is arbitrary, since fibr.vf has integer escapement values
rounded from the METAFONT values in the tfm files.
4. config.iby and iby.map. The iby.map file shows how to associate
fibr84 with IbycusHTG-Regular.
fibr84 IbycusHTG-Regular <IbycusHTG-Regular.pfa
or
fibr84 IbycusHTG-Regular <fibr.pfa
This line can be copied into psfonts.map for general use.
5. IbycusHTG-Regular.afm and IbycusHTG.enc. These are provided for
information only. The AFM file contains only the character info
and the pair-kerning data. There is no point in going further
since the Adobe convention for AFM is incapable of specifying the
ligature sequences needed for ibycus4. The encoding file could
supply both ligatures and pair-kerns, but to what purpose?
6. Various TeX input files rewritten to use the fibr invocation in
place of the fibr84 invocation. (This is the only change that
users will need to make, other than installing the above files in
the TEXMF directory tree).
IbycusHTG-Regular is licensed without charge for use in the creation of
documents in all media, in accordance with the included copyright
notice. Users are welcome and indeed encouraged to adapt the font
to other typesetting systems. Note that iota subscript is applied to
the affected vowel as a following zero-width character kerned
drastically to the left. (Other well-known Polytonic Greek fonts
do the same thing. This trick saves many, many glyph spaces for more
constructive use.)
mackay@cs.washington.edu Pierre A. MacKay
Smail: Department of Classics Emeritus Druid for
Denny Hall, Box 353110 Unix-flavored TeX
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 543-2268 (Message recorder)