[Fontinst] normal, compact, expand and fontinst

[Lars Hellström]

9 feb 2007 kl. 22.46 skrev Michael A Peters:
> Looking at the archives, I hope this is a user list and not just
> development ... apologies if it is developer.

No, it's for all sorts of things. (There isn't that much traffic 
anyway.)

> I'm trying to use fontinst to install the "Phollick" family by
> Typotheticals (Graham Meade).
[snip]
> For the berry name I used fpk as it looks like pk isn't officially 
> taken
> in the Sept 2005 fontname.pdf file. The fonts are all standard adobe
> encoding.

You might want to register that "officially", then. A mail to the TeX 
Fonts list <tex-fonts at math.utah.edu> saying "I want a family code for 
font XXX, is YY available?", plus a list of the fonts (names, vendor 
file names, and whatever you can provide) is often appreciated.

> and it seems to work - but the map file only points to two of the pfb
> files:
>
> fpkr8r Phollick <8r.enc <fpkr8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont "
> fpkro8r PhollickOblique <8r.enc <fpkro8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding
> ReEncodeFont "
>
> I still have a lot to learn about type1 fonts in LaTeX but I'm guessing
> the compact and expand variants of the font can't be used if the map
> file doesn't point to the actual pfb files,

Quite right!

> so I think I must be doing
> something wrong (missing something?) in the fpk-drv file.
>
> Any hints would be appreciated.

A likely cause is that \latinfamily doesn't stumble upon (because 
that's about as smart as it is) the other two widths. It prints out 
oodles of information about what fonts it looks at, though, so if you 
look through that you should be able to spot whether it tries to handle 
them or not.

For getting it to work, there are (at least) three different approaches:
1. There could be a fix as simple as using a different width code in 
the font names; you'll see that if you look through the log messages 
mentioned above.
2. It is possible to modify \latinfamily's list of widths, so that it 
processes those you have here even if it wouldn't by default. It's too 
late at night for me to recall the exact macros to redefine, however.
3. Finally, it is always the case that you can tell fontinst exactly 
what fonts you want to make (and from what) by writing explicit 
\installfont commands; look in examples/basicex.tex (that's in the 
fontinst directory on CTAN, dunno where it might have been put in TeX 
Live right now) for some suggestions.

> Also - I know fake font faces are generally frowned upon in 
> typesetting,
> but does anyone know of a simple way (IE maybe fontforge cli command) 
> to
> script creation of bold weight afm/pfb from the real fonts?

I know that a long time ago, bold fonts were sometimes faked by 
changing a parameter in the font (somewhat analogous to using larger 
pens throughout in a MetaFont font, if you know that), but whether that 
is "simple" to achieve today is another matter. (It could be that it 
works fine in real postscript, but fails miserably in PDF.) If noone 
comes up with anything better, I'll see if I can reconstruct this 
trick.

Lars Hellström