[XeTeX] Macintosh PostScript fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

Hi Mojca,

On 12 Feb 2008, at 3:20 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> 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).

Right, that'll be the reason for this apparent difference.

>
> 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.

Yes; these are an old Mac format (LWFN files) with the PostScript  
code split into a number of resources in the resource fork; that's  
why "ls" (which only looks at the data fork) sees the file as zero- 
length.

> The font comes in two
> "flavours": Macintosh PostScript and "Windows PostScript". (I suspect
> that the latter would probably work OK.)

Yes, but they wouldn't be installable into the Mac fonts folder and  
findable by name; they'd have to be installed in the texmf tree and  
accessed via .tfm files, .map files, etc. The Mac font subsystem  
doesn't directly support .pfb PostScript fonts.

>
> Is there any hope for such fonts or should one simply forget about
> them?

It's one of the things I've been hoping to fix some day, but haven't  
had time to work on yet.

> (I understand that there are certanly many more important
> features to be implemented than this one.)

Yes, in my opinion.

> 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.)

They do work on Mac OS X systems, though they're not a good choice  
(e.g., very limited character set, no AAT or OpenType layout  
support). It's just that (x)dvipdfmx, with its non-Mac background,  
doesn't know how to read them.

JK