[texhax] The 'TeX ' metric table in OpenType fonts
Doug McKenna
doug at mathemaesthetics.com
Wed Nov 21 22:08:50 CET 2012
All (well, okay, Any) -
I've been messing around with OpenType/TrueType fonts, trying to
(re-)understand how the data structures work under the hood. Basically,
a ".otf" (or ".ttf") file is an extensible list of tagged tables,
containing all variety of information. Any software that reads the file
has the ability to ignore any table it doesn't understand.
There's dozens of table types, some for different platforms, different
software packages, etc. I am trying to put together a list of as many
table tags as I can collect.
One in particular caught my eye: the FontForge program supports
creating a 'TeX ' table type. It's documented here (about halfway
down the page):
<http://cle.linux.org.tw/~edt1023/fontforge/non-standard.html>
But it plainly does not support all the information found in a ".tfm"
file.
Are there any fonts out there that incorporate this information? Was
this just a FontForge experiement that went nowhere, because the only
program that cares about TeX Font Metrics is ... TeX, and it doesn't know
about OpenType font internals? Is it for the benefit of XeTeX?
I can't find any other substantive information or discussion about this
OpenType table type, except the above link.
Que pasa?
[And Happy Thanksgiving!]
Doug McKenna
More information about the texhax
mailing list