Re: Freefonts -> LaTeX

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

Christophe TROESTLER <debian00@tiscalinet.be> writes:

> Does anybody knows whether there is a package (or any help) to use the
> fonts in the ``freefont'' package with LaTeX. 

Oh, you have got to be kidding....

CTAN doesn't appear to have anything.  If I were to do this (and trust
me, I would _not_ do this... I'd just do them as I decided I wanted
them), I'd try to set up a script around vfinst (not packaged in
Debian, afaik) and let it do the heavy lifting.  You'd need to rename
all the fonts according to the fontname conventions, which vfinst will
do for you if it can, but I'd suppose many fonts in freefonts don't
already have assigned names.  I haven't used vfinst, so I don't know
how well a job it would do on these fonts, but it's probably the best
bet.

I suppose you could just use afm2tfm, but I'm not sure how well those
would work... the nice thing about the vfinst/fontinst setup is that
it handles all the encoding issues for you, and ISTR there are a bunch
of them. 

Now, seriously, it might not be that bad.  I am afraid of the work
getting _good_ support for all those fonts automatically[3], but you
might do a usable job.  When I stick new fonts into LaTeX, I'm looking
for:

* Ligatures

* Full set of fonts, so that \emph{} works, for instance

* TS1 virtual fonts so the bullets and other special characters come
  from the fonts, not CM

* Faking math fonts so they look as good as possible, at minimum using
  text digits.

If you just want to be able to do headlines or random bits of text in
other fonts, it would probably be much easier.  You might dig through
CTAN... once upon a time Sebastian Rahtz had a setup on there which
would make basic support for all the Adobe fonts he had afms for.
ISTR that once you got things named according to KB names, 

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
The time for action is past!  Now is the time for senseless bickering.