Bug#250216: More about TrueType support of dvips

[frank@kuesterei.ch (Frank Küster)]

uwe@steinmann.cx (Uwe Steinmann) wrote:

> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 11:29:09AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
>> Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> > I'm not sure and have not enough time to test Type42 fonts
>> > at present so if someone has confirmed that dvips didn't 
>> > support Type42 fonts then I suspect it might be good to report 
>> > this to the upstream.
>> 
>> a "grep -i type.*42" over the dvipsk sources in tetex-beta_2.96.1 gives
>> only (probably false positive) hits in testdata/*pdb.
>> 
>> So it seems this is not yet possible.
> dvips can handle type 42 fonts. It just cannot subset the font.
> I've written a program to install type 1 and tt fonts for TeX/LaTeX/pdftex.
> It uses ttftot42 to convert ttf to type 42 and then just proceeds as
> with type 1 fonts.

Ah, that means that dvips can handle them, but it cannot convert ttf to
type42 on-the fly, right? The name "wrapper font for ttf" that was
attributed to the type42 fonts previously in this bug made me think that
no conversion is necessary.

Since you have experience in this, you can probably tell us whether it
would be, in principle, possible, and sensible and in accord with dvips'
design, to include the conversion into dvips proper? 

Anyway, I remember faintly that you announced your program. Did you
upload it to CTAN, and do you know of any users? Is it possible to
integrate it into teTeX's mechanism of generating necessary font files
on-the-fly, so that the type42 fonts could be generated just as pk fonts
are? 

Thanks in advance, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie