[XeTeX] Fwd: Problem with pfb fonts/T1Wrap

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Apr 2005, at 12:33 pm, Christos Papachristou wrote:

> I am using xetex version 0.94 and trying to make it use the greek 
> postscript fonts I use for latex . Using a simple text file with the 
> following preamble
>
> \documentclass[12pt,a4paper,twoside,openright]{report}
> \usepackage[american,greek]{babel}
> \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
> \usepackage{ucs}
> \begin{document}
>
> I get the following error messages.
>
> ) [1] (./greektest.aux)exception: SimplePSInterpreterException  
> reason: condition in if is not a boolean
>
> *** font activation failed (status=0): grmn1200.pfb
>
> *** font grmn1200 (TeX-grmn1200: file 'grmn1200.pfb') not found
>
> *** font grmn1200 (grmn1200.pfb) not found, will substitute Helvetica 
> glyphs
>
>
> LaTeX Font Warning: Some font shapes were not available, defaults 
> substituted.
>
>
> It seemed to me at the beginning that it was a path problem, yet when 
> I tried to convert the grmn1200.pfb from the cbgreek package manually 
> using the T1Wrap utility, I got the message "exception: 
> SimplePSInterpreterException  reason: condition in if is not a 
> boolean" and no output. Is this a bug in T1Wrap or am I doing 
> something wrong?

It's a bug (or maybe I should say a "limitation"!) in T1Wrap.

The tool has to parse the Type 1 font in order to correctly "wrap" it 
for Quartz and provide the encoding information XeTeX needs. But it 
doesn't have a complete PostScript Type 1 interpreter, only a 
quick-and-dirty "pseudo-interpreter" that I hacked up (and Massimiliano 
of TeXniscope fame then converted to Objective-C for better 
performance). There are certain types of PostScript coding found in 
some .pfb fonts that it doesn't handle adequately---and you seem to 
have found a font that is affected by this.

We may be able to enhance the tool to handle this better, but that will 
take some time and effort, and isn't likely to happen right away.

In general, if you're wanting to use legacy (non-Unicode) fonts like 
this, there's little reason to use XeTeX rather than pdfTeX. To typeset 
Greek with XeTeX, I'd generally recommend using a Unicode-compliant 
Greek font (e.g., Gentium, Galatia SIL, or others), and avoiding 
packages such as "inputenc" and "ucs". These exist to provide support 
for some Unicode characters within an 8-bit TeX setup, but are not 
really appropriate for a fully Unicode-based working environment.

JK