path: root/Build/source/texk/afm2pl/afm2pl.xml

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<article>
<articleinfo>
  <title>afm2pl</title>
  <author>
    <firstname>Siep</firstname>
    <surname>Kroonenberg</surname>
    <affiliation>
      <address><email>ntg-afm2pl@ntg.nl</email></address>
    </affiliation>
  </author>

  <copyright>
    <year>2004</year>
    <holder>Siep Kroonenberg</holder>
  </copyright>
</articleinfo>

<refentry>
<refentryinfo>
  <title>afm2pl</title>
  <date>February 2004</date>
  <!--productname Linux /productname-->
</refentryinfo>

<refmeta>
  <refentrytitle>afm2pl</refentrytitle>
  <manvolnum>1</manvolnum>
</refmeta>

<refnamediv>
  <refname>afm2pl</refname>
  <refpurpose>convert AFM font metrics to TeX pl font metrics
  </refpurpose>
</refnamediv>

<refsynopsisdiv>
  <cmdsynopsis>
    <command>afm2pl</command>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-p</option>
      <replaceable>encoding_file</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-o</option></arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-e</option>
      <replaceable>extension_factor</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-s</option>
      <replaceable>slant_factor</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-f</option>
      <replaceable>font_dimensions</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-k</option></arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-m</option>
      <replaceable>letter_spacing</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-l</option>
      <replaceable>ligkern_spec</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><option>-L</option>
      <replaceable>ligkern_spec</replaceable>
    </arg>
    <arg choice="req"><replaceable>input_file[.afm]</replaceable></arg>
    <arg choice="opt"><replaceable>output_file[.pl]</replaceable></arg>
  </cmdsynopsis>

  <cmdsynopsis>
    <command>afm2pl</command>
    <group choice="req">
      <arg>--help</arg>
      <arg>--version</arg>
    </group>
  </cmdsynopsis>
</refsynopsisdiv>

<refsect1>
<title>Description</title>
<para>afm2pl converts an afm (Adobe Font Metric) file into a pl
(Property List) file, which in its turn can be converted to a tfm
(TeX Font Metric) file. It preserves kerns and ligatures.</para>

<para>afm2pl is meant to be a replacement for afm2tfm, on which it
is based. With afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is possible
only in a roundabout way.</para>

<para>For text fonts, Y&amp;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.</para>

<para>Full LaTeX support for this encoding is available in the form
of the texnansi package, which is already part of TeX Live and
teTeX. These distributions also contain the encoding file
texnansi.enc.</para>

<para>The distribution contains uppercased and lowercased versions
of texnansi, viz. texnanuc.enc and texnanlc.enc, to allow font-based
rather than macro-based uppercasing and lowercasing, and the
familiar old ot1 encoding plus some variations in PostScript .enc
format (I included these because they seem to be absent from
teTeX/TeX Live).  </para>

<para>Return value: 0 if no error; a negative number indicating the
number of missing glyphs if
conversion was successfull but glyphs are missing, and 1 in case of
error.</para>
</refsect1>

<refsect1>
<title>Options</title>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-p</option> <replaceable>encoding_file</replaceable></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>The default is the encoding specified
     in the afm file, which had better match the encoding in the
     fontfile (pfa or pfb). The generated mapfile entry (see below)
     instructs pdftex or the dvi driver to reencode the font on the fly.
     On-the-fly reencoding does not require virtual fonts.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-o</option></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Use octal for all character codes in the pl file.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-e</option> <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Widen or narrow characters by
      <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable>. Default is 1.0
      (natural width). Not recommended, except that
      arguably a narrowed Courier is less jarring than a full-width
      Courier, when used in
      combination with a normal proportional font.
      For Courier, choose .833 to match the width of cmtt.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-s</option> <replaceable>slant_factor</replaceable></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Oblique (slant) characters by
    <replaceable>slant_factor</replaceable>.
    Not recommended.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-f</option>
  <replaceable>font_dimensions</replaceable></term> <listitem>
  <para>The value is either the
  keyword <literal>afm2tfm</literal> or a comma-separated list of up
  to five integers. The parameters are listed below, with their
  defaults and their value when the afm2tfm keyword is
  specified. &lsquo;Space&rsquo; means the width of a space in the
  target font, except of course in the last row.
  Keep in mind that the design size is 1000, and that all numbers
  must be nonnegative integers.</para>

<informaltable>
<tgroup cols='3'>
<colspec colwidth='*'/>
<colspec colwidth='2*'/>
<colspec colwidth='2*'/>
<thead>
<row>
 <entry>Font dimension</entry>
 <entry>Default value</entry>
 <entry>Afm2tfm value</entry></row></thead>
<tbody>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>stretch</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>space div 2</entry>
 <entry>300 &times; <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></entry>
</row>

<row>
<entry><replaceable>shrink</replaceable></entry>
<entry>space div 3</entry>
<entry>100 &times; <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></entry>
</row>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>extra space</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>space div 3</entry>
 <entry>missing</entry>
</row>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>quad</replaceable></entry>
<entry>2 &times; width of &lsquo;0&rsquo;</entry>
 <entry>1000 &times; <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></entry>
</row>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>space</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>(space source font) &times; <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>(space source font) &times; <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></entry>
</row>

  </tbody></tgroup></informaltable>

<para>For fixed-pitch fonts, different values apply:</para>

<informaltable>
<tgroup cols='3'>
<colspec colwidth='*'/>
<colspec colwidth='2*'/>
<colspec colwidth='2*'/>
<thead>
<row>
 <entry>Font dimension</entry>
 <entry>Default value</entry>
 <entry>Afm2tfm value</entry></row></thead>
<tbody>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>stretch</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>0</entry>
 <entry>0</entry>
</row>

<row>
<entry><replaceable>shrink</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>0</entry>
 <entry>0</entry>
</row>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>extra space</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>space</entry>
 <entry>missing</entry>
</row>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>quad</replaceable></entry>
<entry>2 &times; character width</entry>
 <entry>1000 &times; <replaceable>extend_factor</replaceable></entry>
</row>

<row>
 <entry><replaceable>space</replaceable></entry>
 <entry>character width</entry>
 <entry>character width</entry>
</row>

  </tbody></tgroup></informaltable>

<para>Specify just a non-default stretch and shrink with
    e.g. <literal>150,70</literal> and just a non-default extra
    space with <literal>,,10</literal>.</para>

  </listitem> </varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-k</option></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Keep original ligatures. This option only has effect in
    combination with positive letterspacing; see the section on
    <link linkend="lspace">letterspacing and extra ligkern info.</link>
    </para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-m</option> <replaceable>letter_spacing</replaceable></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Letterspace by
    <replaceable>letter_spacing</replaceable>/1000 em (integer). This is
    useful for making all-caps typesetting look better. Try a value
    of e.g. 50 or 100. But see the section
    on <link linkend="lspace">letterspacing and extra ligkern info</link>
    for details.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-l</option> <replaceable>ligkern_spec</replaceable></term>
  <term><option>-L</option> <replaceable>ligkern_spec</replaceable></term>
  <listitem>
    <para> See the section
    on <link linkend="lspecs">extra ligkern info</link>
    for details.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>-V</option></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Verbose. If turned on, it reports the number of missing
    glyphs to stderr and their names to stdout. This is not particularly
    logical, but this way the glyph names can be captured even under Windows.
    </para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>--help</option></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Display a short usage message.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
  <term><option>--version</option></term>
  <listitem>
    <para>Display the version number of afm2pl.</para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</refsect1>

<refsect1>
<title>Mapfile entries</title>
<para>afm2pl writes a mapfile entry to a file with the same basename
as the pl output file, but with extension .map. It can be used for
the dvips mapfile and for the pdftex mapfile, although, in case of a
geometrically transformed font, it may be better to remove the
PostScript name for a pdftex mapfile entry.  It is assumed that the
pfb file has the same basename as the afm file and must be
downloaded. <emphasis>You may have to hand-edit this
entry.</emphasis></para>

<para>You can configure dvips and pdftex to read this additional
mapfile or otherwise add the entry to an existing mapfile. It
appears that pdftex automatically will consult a mapfile xxx.map for
a font xxx.</para>
</refsect1>

<refsect1 id="lspecs" xreflabel="ligkern specs">
<title>Extra ligkern info</title>

<para><emphasis>Most users are well-advised to leave this mess alone
and to accept the default behavior.</emphasis></para>

<para>The ligatures and kerns present in the afm file can be
modified in various ways.  Default, the encoding file is scanned for
extra ligkern specifications, whose format will be described below.
If there are no ligkern specifications in the encoding file, then
extra ligkern specifications will be read from a file default.lig. A
value of 0 for <replaceable>ligkern_spec</replaceable> means that
the ligatures and kerns from the afm file won't be tampered with and
a value of 1 specifies default behavior. One can also specify a
comma-separated list of files with extra ligkerns specs.</para>

<para>If afm2pl is compiled with the kpathsea library, then these
files will be searched for under $TEXMF/fonts/lig.</para>

<para><emphasis>Note that ligatures and kerns are hints for the
typesetting application; there is no need to download this
information to the printer or to make it available to a dvi
driver.</emphasis></para>

<para>The parser for ligkern info has been inherited from afm2tfm
virtually without change.  A ligkern specification can have one of
the following forms:</para>

<screen>
<replaceable>glyph_name1</replaceable> <replaceable>glyph_name2</replaceable> <replaceable>lig_op</replaceable> <replaceable>glyph_name3</replaceable> ;
</screen>

<para>This specifies a ligature. Possible values for
<replaceable>lig_op</replaceable> are <literal>=:</literal>,
<literal>|=:</literal>, <literal>|=:></literal>,
<literal>=:|</literal>, <literal>=:|></literal>,
<literal>|=:|</literal>, <literal>|=:|></literal> and
<literal>|=:|&gt;&gt;</literal>.
These correspond to <literal>LIG</literal>,
<literal>/LIG</literal>, <literal>/LIG&gt;</literal>,
<literal>LIG/</literal>, <literal>LIG/&gt;</literal>,
<literal>/LIG/</literal>, <literal>/LIG/&gt;</literal>,
<literal>/LIG/&gt;&gt;</literal> in .pl syntax; see the pltotf
documentation and the .lig files in the distribution.</para>

<screen>
<replaceable>glyph_name1</replaceable> &lt;&gt; <replaceable>glyph_name2</replaceable> ;
</screen>

<para>Kern <replaceable>glyph_name1</replaceable> as
<replaceable>glyph_name2</replaceable>.</para>

<screen>
<replaceable>glyph_name1</replaceable> {} <replaceable>glyph_name2</replaceable> ;
</screen>

<para>Remove the kern between <replaceable>glyph_name1</replaceable>
and <replaceable>glyph_name2</replaceable>. A value of
<literal>*</literal> for either glyph name is interpreted as a
wildcard.</para>

<screen>
|| = <replaceable>glyph</replaceable> ;
</screen>

<para>Set the (right) boundary character to
<replaceable>glyph</replaceable>.  <replaceable>glyph</replaceable>
may be either a glyphname or a slot in the encoding vector. Choosing
a glyph which doesn't occur in the output encoding is equivalent to
not specifying a boundarychar at all. It is ok to pick an encoded
glyphname which does not occur in the afm. In fact, this is what
default.lig does: <literal>|| = cwm ;</literal>.</para>

<para>You can copy the kerns of an unencoded character to the
boundarychar:</para>

<screen>
|| &lt;&gt; space ;
</screen>

<para>This ligkern specification should occur before the one that
deletes space kerns.</para>

<para>A ligkern specification should be contained within one line.
One line may contain several ligkern specifications, separated by
spaces. Note that <literal> ;</literal> (space followed by
semicolon) is considered part of the ligkern specification. See the
lig files included in this distribution. Example:</para>

<screen>
one {} * ; * {} one ; two {} * ; * {} two ;
</screen>

<para>Lines with ligkern specifications inside an encoding file
should start with <literal>% LIGKERN </literal>. Ligkern
specifications in a lig file may optionally start this way.</para>
</refsect1>

<refsect1 id="lspace" xreflabel="letterspacing">
<title>Letterspacing and extra ligkern info</title>

<para>Letterspacing has various side-effects for ligkern
info. Instead of simply applying the extra ligkern info (see
previous section), the following is done:</para>

<orderedlist>
<listitem><para>In case of positive letterspacing, native ligatures
are removed, unless the -k option is specified.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>Extra ligkern info is applied as usual, except that in
case of positive letterspacing different defaults apply:
<literal>-l 0</literal> is quietly ignored, ligkern comments in
the encoding file are ignored, and defpre.lig is read instead of
default.lig.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>Letterspacing is applied. This adds a lot of kerns,
and modifies existing kerns.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>The extra ligkern info specified with -L is applied.
The only ligkern specs which are allowed here, are removals of
kerning pairs (with the <literal>{}</literal> operator).  Values
0 and 1 have a similar meaning as for the -l parameter.  The tfm
format has room for only about 180x180 ligatures and kerning pairs.
This is enough for OT1 encoding, but for texnansi encoding quite a
few ligkern specifications  have to be removed.  The pltotf program
will remove <emphasis>all</emphasis> ligkern info if too many
ligatures and kerns remain. The default lig file is defpost.lig.
This file throws out kerning pairs which are unlikely to be involved
in letterspacing, such as kerns involving accents or kerns with a
punctuation character or right bracket at the left. It does not add
letterspacing kerns involving boundarychars.  Instead, fontspace is
increased by twice the letterspacing. defpost.lig throws out
enough kerns in case of texnansi encoding.  With other encodings,
you may have to throw out additional kerning
pairs.</para></listitem> </orderedlist>
</refsect1>

<refsect1>
<title>Font-based upper- and lowercasing</title>

<para>The distribution includes encoding vectors texnanuc.enc and
texnanlc.enc which produce all-uppercase and all-lowercase fonts.
The distribution contains an example ucshape.tex on how to use such
fonts with LaTeX font selection.</para>

<para>The principal uses for an all-uppercase font are page headers
and section heads. If these contain math, then macro-based
uppercasing would create unpleasant complications.</para>

<refsect2>
<title>The sz ligature &szlig;</title>
<para>Note that the texnanuc encoding provides no glyph for the sz
ligature &szlig;; you'll either have to substitute ss or provide a
macro-based solution. The following code uses either the usual glyph
or substitutes the letters ss, depending on whether the glyph exists
in the current font:</para>

<programlisting>
<![CDATA[
\def\ss{%
  \setbox0\hbox{\char25}%
  \ifnum\wd0=0 ss\else\box0\fi
}
]]>
</programlisting>
<para>In LaTeX, this code appears to work well enough, although on
occasion you may need to insert <literal>\protect</literal>.  A
better solution might involve the sixth parameter of the
<literal>\DeclareFontShape</literal> macro, but I failed to get
that to work.</para>
</refsect2>
</refsect1>

<refsect1>
<title>Afm2pl, fontinst and artificial smallcaps</title>
<para>Afm2pl currently doesn't do virtual fonts. That means that for
things such as artificial smallcaps you have to turn elsewhere,
e.g. to the fontinst package, which is part of any mainstream TeX
distribution.</para>

<para>Look under texmf/tex/fontinst for fontinst support files,
which allow you to generate a smallcaps font (tfm and vf files) from
an afm2pl-generated tfm file.  This package only supports texnansi
encoding.</para>

<para>There should be no real problem in doing the same for OT1
encoding. However, there are several variations of the OT1 encoding
to take care of. Also, there are as far as I know no officially
sanctioned PostScript names for all the variations of the OT1
encoding; the fontinst names contain spaces and are therefore not
useable as PostScript names.</para>
</refsect1>

<refsect1>
<title>Future plans</title>

<para>I am considering a revision which makes afm2pl a more complete
replacement for afm2tfm. In that version, afm2pl can optionally
create a second, virtual font, possibly with a different encoding
and possibly letterspaced. The current option of non-virtual
letterspacing via kerns will be dropped. If the encodings differ
then it is assumed that the virtual font is intended as a small-caps
version of the main font, and a scaling parameter can be
specified for non-matching glyphs.</para> </refsect1>

<refsect1>
<title>Copyright</title>
<para>The afm2pl distribution is subject to the GNU General Public Licence
(GPL). Please refer to the file COPYING for details.</para>

<para>The afm2pl homepage is <ulink
url="http://www.ntg.nl/afm2pl.html">http://www.ntg.nl/afm2pl.html</ulink>.</para>
</refsect1>

</refentry>
</article>