DESCRIPTION afm2pl is meant to be a replacement for afm2tfm, on which it is based. Its default action is to convert an afm file to a tfm file, with preservation of kerns and ligatures (with afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is possible only in a roundabout way). For PostScript text fonts, Y&Y's texnansi is the recommended encoding to be used with afm2pl. This gives you a good character set with all the more important accented characters and many typographic symbols available as single characters, without a need for either virtual fonts or a separate text companion font. Full LaTeX support for this encoding is available in the form of the texnansi package, which is already part of TeX Live and teTeX. The distribution also contains uppercased and lowercased versions of texnansi, texnanuc.enc and texnanlc.enc, to allow font-based rather than macro-based uppercasing and lowercasing. LaTeX macro support for this, in the context of LaTeX2e's font handling, is not hard; the key is to treat all-uppercase and all-lowercase as new shapes. USAGE This is the help message printed by afm2pl: Usage: afm2pl [OPTIONS]... FILE[.afm] [FILE[.pl]] Convert an Adobe font metric file to a TeX font property list. -p ENCFILE Read/download ENCFILE for the PostScript encoding -o Use octal for all character codes in the pl file -e REAL Widen (extend) characters by a factor of REAL -s REAL Oblique (slant) characters by REAL, generally <<1 -m INTEGER Letterspace by INTEGER/1000 em --help Print this message and exit. --version Print version number and exit. See the man page for full documentation. Email bug reports to ntg-afm2pl@ntg.nl INSTALLATION FROM SOURCE Afm2pl is meant to be incorporated into a current TeX Live/teTeX installation. TeX Live already includes afm2pl, and for teTeX (version >= 3.0) you can simply place the afm2pl source directory under texk before compilation. A Windows binary is also provided. TROUBLESHOOTING Problem: I get warnings I had to round some heights by 10.0000000 units. I had to round some depths by 2.0000000 units. Solution: This is not a problem. afm2pl uses units of 1/1000 times the design size, so these rounding errors are really quite small. Problem: Characters are missing. I am using T1 encoding. T1 encoding requires virtual fonts, since it encodes many accented characters which aren't available as single characters in commercial Type 1 fonts. Afm2pl doesn't create virtual fonts. By using texnansi instead, you force TeX to compose these missing characters from an accent and the base character. Problem: Letterspacing doesn't work Explanation: In this version, letterspacing is implemented with kerns. However, the tfm format accomodates only about half the amount of kerning pairs needed for full letterspacing. I have tried hard to create a set which falls within these boundaries but still contains all kerning pairs which are likely to matter. If you use a different encoding, you might exceed these boundaries and as a consequence lose all glyphs and kerns. Feedback is welcome. June 23 2005 Siep Kroonenberg ntg-afm2pl@ntg.nl http://www.ntg.nl/afm2pl.html