[tex-k] Plans about supporting TrueType/Type42 fonts in dvips?

[Paul Vojta]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 06:59:28PM +0200, Karl Berry wrote:
>     are there any plans to enable dvips to include TrueType fonts in a
>     Postscript file, by wrapping them up as Type42 fonts?  
> 
> I am not aware of anything along these lines.  Tom?
> 
> If there is some TrueType+TeX volunteer interested in working on it,
> patches would be welcome, I'm sure.  I also feel sure there are a lot of
> subsidiary issues.  It would be good to be compatible with pdftex's
> truetype support, if that makes sense.  (I'm not too familiar with what
> pdftex can and can't do with truetype.)

I have looked into supporting TrueType in xdvi.  A key subsidiary issue
that came up (and stopped it for me) was compatibility with ttf2tfm and
ttf2pk.  They come up with their own character encoding that basically
(as I recall) chooses the lowest-numbered 255 or 256 available
characters into the encoding vector.  Adding to the difficulties is
the fact that ttf2tfm/ttf2pk use the old (version 1) freetype library.
I tried porting these programs to freetype2, but the latter lacks some
features of the original freetype, and is never likely to have them
(Werner Lemberg said that programs should use pango instead for these
features).

--Paul Vojta, vojta at math.berkeley.edu