Fw: Re: [Aleph] OpenType-to-TeX and other musings...

[Hans Hagen]

Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

> Hi Hans
>
> On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 02:22:20 -0700, Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> wrote:
>
>>> 3. We still need to support the 16-bit level-0 ovf fonts. Even 
>>> with   opentype, a large virtual font format is needed and ovf's 
>>> perform   excellently in my experience (though some of the utilities 
>>> are buggy).  In  any case, I hope it's not too much to ask that 
>>> pdfetex++ support  the old  ovf's lying around...
>>
>>
>> what makes those ovf fonts unique? can't they be replaced by open 
>> type  variants?
>
>
> 1. Remember, we still have large CID PS fonts, not to mention regular 
> ps  fonts which need to be concatenated into one (large) encoding. Of 
> course,  one could use FontForge etc. to merge ps type 1 fonts, but it 
> would still  be nice to be able to create and use large virtual fonts 
> from multiple  other fonts, even open type fonts. Besides, dvips and 
> dvipdfmx already  support it, so no work needed there. It's a 
> well-working format as far as  my experience goes.
>
> OpenType does not necessarily make virtual fonts obsolete, does it?

the ability to combine fonts (map chars and char ranges onto fonts and 
associate macro code to char instances etc etc ) is a necessity and 
should take place under macro control (actually, thanh already has 
experimental code for making fonts at th emacro level in pdftex but so 
far it didn't make it into the main code base)

whatever we provide, we should not cripple tex for the sole reason of 
supporting one or two weird fonts, esp if those fonts can be normalized

Hans