Re: hidden composites

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

   hello,

   there exist some fonts (like Monotype baskerville or Lino didot) where
   the AFM declares true chars that are indeed composites built in the
   PFA by  a seac construct. These may fool some partial font downloading
   software (downloading the PFA definition of egrave in mbvr8r willnot
   download the two outlines needed to print this char). An example being
   the current pdftex.

Oops! Are you sure? This works in *some* partial font downloading schemes :-)

   As these PS fonts are usually used through fontinst's VFs,  I think it
   would be more interesting to redeclare these chars as composites in
   the AFM, and do the composition inside the VF, which would solve this
   particular problem. 

   Does anybody know how to add the composite section of the AFM when the
   only available info is the seac construct in the PFA?

You can use PFAtoAFM and extract the Composites section of the AFM file
(PFAtoAFM is in the Y&Y `Font Manipulation Package').  If you want to do it
by hand then watch out for an error in the original Type 1 book which
says that the offsets are with respect to the character origins when
in fact they are with respect to the left side-bearing point
(the Adobe site has both the Type 1 book in PDF form and the addendum).

   Any different reaction?

Of course, a much better solution is to fix the partial font downloading
you are using.  As far as I can tell it wouldn't slow it down much more,
since it already does more than one pass in order to prune out Subrs
that are not used.

      Thierry Bouche.       -----       thierry.bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr
	     http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~bouche/