[XeTeX] Macintosh PostScript fonts

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hello Jonathan,

Roland Siebelink complained about non-working fonts in ConTeXt+XeTeX
on the mailing list. It turned out that there were numerous problems
with ConTeXt itself (as XeTeX support has been broken for quite some
time in past), but not this specific one:

\font\a="Eco101Roman"\a abc
\bye

--------

This is what I get with one of the latest versions of XeTeX (not sure
which one exactly):

> xdvipdfmx -vv e.xdv
DVI Comment:  XeTeX output 2008.02.12:1518
e.xdv -> e.pdf
[1<Eco101Roman(Eco101Roman:Plain)@9.93pt<NATIVE-FONTMAP:Eco101Roman/H/65536/0>
fontmap: Eco101Roman/H/65536/0 -> Eco101Roman/H/65536/0(Identity-H)

pdf_font>> Input encoding "Identity-H" requires at least 2 bytes.
pdf_font>> The -m <00> option will be assumed for "Eco101Roman/H/65536/0".
>
** ERROR ** Invalid font: -1 (0)

Output file removed.

> xdv2pdf -v e.xdv
[1
{fontmap: /usr/local/gwTeX/texmf.local/fonts/map/dvips/updmap/psfonts.map}
{activate /Library/Caches/Type1-sfnt-fonts/cmr10.pfb-sfnt.otf}]
WARNING: Type1 font data returned by OFAStreamPSDownload isn't in the
correct format required by the Adobe Type 1 Font Format specification.

But with xdv2pdf it produces the PDF at least.

------

I suspected that it might be a XeTeX problem, but it made me wonder
that he claimed it worked without any problem with XeLaTeX (now I
understand that it worked because it used xdv2pdf back in the TeX Live
2007-times, and ConTeXt uses xdvipdfmx only).

The font itself is extremely weird. "ls" shows 0 bytes, but then
Roland pointed me to the following article (How does Macintosh Store
PostScript Fonts?):
    http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~milanek/PostScript/Reference/FontsIx.html
The font is "old as earth" anyway, but apparently many more (just as
old) fonts fail the same way as this one. The font comes in two
"flavours": Macintosh PostScript and "Windows PostScript". (I suspect
that the latter would probably work OK.)

Is there any hope for such fonts or should one simply forget about
them? (I understand that there are certanly many more important
features to be implemented than this one.) The sad thing is that such
"old and obsolete" fonts are still being sold. (They could at least
fix them to work on more modern systems.)

Thanks,
    Mojca