[tex-k] Feature requests: otf/ttf, font expansion

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Zedler <Michael.Zedler at tum.de> writes:

  > Hello, Even though running pdftex in pdf mode has become
  > tremendously popular, I prefer to go the traditional dvips way for
  > several reasons. It'd be very nice if you would consider adding
  > the following features 
  >    1) otf inclusion (opentype cff)
  >    2) ttf inclusion (plain ttf/opentype ttf)
  >    3) automatic generation of expanded metrics (for use with
  > \usepackage[DVIoutput,expansion]{microtype}

To make new pdfTeX features available to dvips it would make sense to
remove them from pdfTeX and put them into an extra library which can
be used by both programs.  I talked with some pdfTeX developers about
that and everyone told me that it is non-trivial and that nobody has
enough time to do it.

OTF and Unicode support is planned to be added to pdfTeX and TTF can
be used already.

  > Reasons for 1,2: pfb are slowly dieing out, many useful fonts are
  > made available these days as otf/ttf only.  These are the common
  > workarounds: convert the otf to pfb (this may be prohibited in the
  > license), for ttf not letting dvips include the font but to do
  > this in the ps->pdf conversion stage. The latter involves having
  > different map files for dvips and pdftex; this is problematic to
  > impossible with updmap of today's distributions. (I don't consider
  > ttf-> pfb conversion an alternative because hinting information is
  > lost and it may be prohibited in the license, too.)  The
  > workarounds are not nice, I think.

I absolutely agree that it doesn't make sense to convert a well hinted
TTF font to Type1.

As far as updmap is concerned, I think that it should look for TTF
first when it creates pdftex.map and for PF[AB] when it creates
psfonts.map.

  > Reason for 3: Right now one needs to have all expanded metrics
  > locally stored. This adds extra work for the user to generate
  > these metrics, and the tfm/vf pile can become extremely large: For
  > a book I created expanded metrics of the MinionPro package on
  > CTAN, this accumulated to some 1.5GB...

As I said before, more devopers are needed.  It's sad, but I fear that
when more features will be added to pdfTeX and there will be not enough
developers in the future, we have to give up dvips completely.

  > I'm not a programmer so I cannot provide patches, but the code
  > does exist already: 

  >  1) cfftot1 from the lcdf typetools

Are there stand alone CFF fonts?  I suppose that you are talking
about CFF in OTF.  But this will certainly be part of the planned OTF
support in pdfTeX.

  >  2) Type42 conversion (from, e.g., fontforge)

The problem is to create a subset from a TTF before converting it to
Type42. 

  >  3) the autoexpand feature of pdftex

It's not easy to make it work with dvips.  

  > What do you think?

Good ideas, more devopers are needed.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------