[Fontinst] OpenType and unix/linux and tex

[WillAdams at aol.com]

As noted, the Omega team is working towards supporting OpenType natively.

Until that happens, there're two alternatives:

 - Conversion - IME, this has quality / reliability issues, and doesn't yield 
the same end result as directly using the original font itself (instead of a 
single font, one gets lots of alternative versions of it w/ different 
encodings, with all the attendant negatives). To my mind, that last is a real 
deal-breaker for professional pre-press work, esp. if you're planning on 
working collaboratively w/ tools which use OpenType fonts properly (say 
graphics done in Illustrator, or a chapter laid out w/ InDesign). It also has 
(potential) difficulties w/ font licenses.

 - Packaging the font in a fashion that it can be accessed indirectly and 
stitched back together---I've been experimenting w/ that for Apple's .dfont / 
ATSUI / AAT / TrueType version of Zapfino---it works as I've mentioned in 
posts to comp.text.tex and the Mac OS X TeX mailing list, but it has serious 
drawbacks (the source file for http://members.aol.com/willadams/ezotest.pdf 
was lots and lots of megabytes....).

another sample of my work w/ this in:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography
(look for the ``Peace on Earth'' .pdf)

William
(who was promised Omega binaries to test, ``real soon now''.)