AFM2PL(1) afm2pl AFM2PL(1)
NAME
afm2pl - convert AFM font metrics to TeX pl font metrics
SYNOPSIS
afm2pl [-p encoding_file] [-o] [-e extension_factor] [-s slant_factor]
[-f font_dimensions] [-k] [-m letter_spacing] [-l ligkern_spec]
[-L ligkern_spec] [-n] input_file[.afm] [output_file[.pl]]
afm2pl [--help] | [--version]
DESCRIPTION
afm2pl converts an afm (Adobe Font Metric) file into a pl (Property
List) file, which in its turn can be converted to a tfm (TeX Font
Metric) file. It normally preserves kerns and ligatures, but also offers
additional control over them.
afm2pl is meant to be a partial replacement for afm2tfm, on which it is
based. With afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is possible only in
a roundabout way, and handling of them is hard-wired.
For text fonts, Y&Y´s texnansi is a good encoding to be used with
afm2pl. Its character set includes all the accented characters likely to
be needed for Western languages, plus many typographic symbols, without
a need for either virtual fonts or a separate text companion font.
Full LaTeX support for this encoding is available in the form of the
texnansi package, which is already part of TeX Live and teTeX. These
distributions also contain the encoding file texnansi.enc.
The distribution contains uppercased and lowercased versions of
texnansi, viz. texnanuc and texnanlc, to allow font-based rather than
macro-based uppercasing and lowercasing, and the familiar old ot1
encoding plus some variations in PostScript .enc format (I included
these because they seem to be absent from teTeX/TeX Live). However,
check your mapfiles if you have old afm2pl-generated fonts using these.
Return value: 0 if no error; a negative number indicating the number of
missing glyphs if conversion was otherwise successful but glyphs are
missing, and 1 in case of error.
OPTIONS
-p encoding_file
The default is the encoding specified in the afm file, which had
better match the encoding in the fontfile (pfa or pfb). If
afm2pl-name.enc exists, afm2pl will use this file instead of
name.enc, unless an option -n is given. The generated mapfile entry
(see below) instructs pdftex or the dvi driver to re-encode the font
on the fly. On-the-fly reencoding does not require virtual fonts.
-o
Use octal for all character codes in the pl file.
-e extend_factor
Widen or narrow characters by extend_factor. Default is 1.0 (natural
width). Not recommended[1].
-s slant_factor
Oblique (slant) characters by slant_factor. Not recommended either.
-f font_dimensions
The value is either the keyword afm2tfm or a comma-separated list of
up to five integers. The parameters are listed below, with their
defaults and their value when the afm2tfm keyword is specified.
‘Space’ means the width of a space in the target font, except of
course in the last row. Keep in mind that the design size is 1000,
and that all numbers must be nonnegative integers.
┌────────────────┬─────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│ Font dimension │ Default value │ Afm2tfm value │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ stretch │ space div 2 │ 300 × extend_factor │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ shrink │ space div 3 │ 100 × extend_factor │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ extra space │ space div 3 │ missing │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ quad │ 2 × width of ‘0’ │ 1000 × extend_factor │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ space │ (space source font) │ (space source font) │
│ │ × extend_factor │ × extend_factor │
└────────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘
For fixed-pitch fonts, different values apply:
┌────────────────┬─────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│ Font dimension │ Default value │ Afm2tfm value │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ stretch │ 0 │ 0 │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ shrink │ 0 │ 0 │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ extra space │ space │ missing │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ quad │ 2 × character width │ 1000 × extend_factor │
├────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ space │ character width │ character width │
└────────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘
Specify just a non-default stretch and shrink with e.g. 150,70 and
just a non-default extra space with ,,10.
-k
Keep original ligatures. This option only has effect in combination
with positive letterspacing; see the section on letterspacing and
extra ligkern info.
-m letter_spacing
Letterspace by letter_spacing/1000 em (integer). This is useful for
making all-caps typesetting look better. Try a value of e.g. 50 or
100. But see the section on letterspacing and extra ligkern info for
details. A better alternative, though, is letting pdftex do the
letterspacing. The microtype package gives LaTeX users access to
this feature.
-l ligkern_spec, -L ligkern_spec
See the section on extra ligkern info for details.
-n
No prefix. For .enc- and .lig files, the program normally first
prefixes the name with `afm2pl-´. Only if the prefixed filename is
not found, will it search for the original filename. This option
prevents searching for the prefixed filename.
-V
Verbose. If turned on, it reports the number of missing glyphs to
stderr and their names to stdout.
--help
Display a short usage message.
--version
Display the version number of afm2pl.
MAPFILE ENTRIES
afm2pl writes a mapfile entry to a file with the same basename as the pl
output file, but with extension .map. It can be used for the dvips
mapfile and for the pdftex mapfile. It is assumed that the pfb file has
the same basename as the afm file and must be downloaded. You may have
to hand-edit this entry.
You can configure dvips and pdftex to read this additional mapfile or
otherwise add the entry to an existing mapfile.
Check your mapfiles! To reduce the likelihood of name conflicts, the
.enc- files which are part of afm2pl (ot1, ot1csc, ot1ital, ot1tt,
texnanlc and texnanuc) have now been prepended with afm2pl-. The .enc
files are referenced in mapfiles. If you have old afm2pl-generated .tfm
files using these, then you should update their mapfile fragments and
rerun updmap or updmap-sys. Or you can copy the relevant enc files to
your personal or local texmf tree under their previous non-prefixed
names.
EXTRA LIGKERN INFO
Most users are well-advised to leave this mess alone and to accept the
default behavior.
The ligatures and kerns present in the afm file can be modified in
various ways. Default, the encoding file is scanned for extra ligkern
specifications, whose format will be described below. If there are no
ligkern specifications in the encoding file, then extra ligkern
specifications will be read from a file [afm2pl-]default.lig. A value of
0 for ligkern_spec means that the ligatures and kerns from the afm file
won´t be tampered with and a value of 1 specifies default behavior. One
can also specify a comma-separated list of files with extra ligkerns
specs.
If afm2pl is compiled with the kpathsea library, then these files will
be searched for under $TEXMF/fonts/lig.
Note that ligatures and kerns are hints for the typesetting application;
there is no need to download this information to the printer or to make
it available to a dvi driver.
The parser for ligkern info has been inherited from afm2tfm virtually
without change. A ligkern specification can have one of the following
forms:
glyph_name1 glyph_name2 lig_op glyph_name3 ;
This specifies a ligature. Possible values for lig_op are =:, |=:, |=:>,
=:|, =:|>, |=:|, |=:|> and |=:|>>. These correspond to LIG, /LIG, /LIG>,
LIG/, LIG/>, /LIG/, /LIG/>, /LIG/>> in .pl syntax; see the pltotf
documentation and the .lig files in the distribution.
glyph_name1 <> glyph_name2 ;
Kern glyph_name1 as glyph_name2.
glyph_name1 {} glyph_name2 ;
Remove the kern between glyph_name1 and glyph_name2. A value of * for
either glyph name is interpreted as a wildcard.
|| = glyph ;
Set the (right) boundary character to glyph. glyph may be either a
glyphname or a slot in the encoding vector. Choosing a glyph which
doesn´t occur in the output encoding is equivalent to not specifying a
boundarychar at all. It is ok to pick an encoded glyphname which does
not occur in the afm. In fact, this is what default.lig does: || = cwm
;.
You can copy the kerns of an unencoded character to the boundarychar.
Below, space is the unencoded character:
|| <> space ;
This ligkern specification should occur before the one that deletes
space kerns.
A ligkern specification should be contained within one line. One line
may contain several ligkern specifications, separated by spaces. Note
that ; (space followed by semicolon) is considered part of the ligkern
specification. See the lig files included in this distribution. Example:
one {} * ; * {} one ; two {} * ; * {} two ;
Lines with ligkern specifications inside an encoding file should start
with % LIGKERN. Ligkern specifications in a lig file may optionally
start this way.
LETTERSPACING AND EXTRA LIGKERN INFO
Letterspacing has various side-effects for ligkern info. Instead of
simply applying the extra ligkern info (see previous section), the
following is done:
1. In case of positive letterspacing, native ligatures are removed,
unless the -k option is specified.
2. Extra ligkern info is applied as usual, except that in case of
positive letterspacing different defaults apply: -l 0 is quietly
ignored, ligkern comments in the encoding file are ignored, and
defpre.lig is read instead of default.lig.
3. Letterspacing is applied. This adds a lot of kerns, and modifies
existing kerns.
4. The extra ligkern info specified with -L is applied. The only
ligkern specs which are allowed here, are removals of kerning
pairs (with the {} operator). Values 0 and 1 have a similar
meaning as for the -l parameter. The tfm format has room for
only about 180x180 ligatures and kerning pairs. This is enough
for OT1 encoding, but for texnansi encoding quite a few ligkern
specifications have to be removed. The pltotf program will remove
all ligkern info if too many ligatures and kerns remain. The
default lig file is defpost.lig. This file throws out kerning
pairs which are unlikely to be involved in letterspacing, such as
kerns involving accents or kerns with a punctuation character or
right bracket at the left. It does not add letterspacing kerns
involving boundarychars. Instead, fontspace is increased by twice
the letterspacing. defpost.lig throws out enough kerns in case of
texnansi encoding. With other encodings, you may have to throw
out additional kerning pairs.
FONT-BASED UPPER- AND LOWERCASING
The distribution includes encoding vectors texnanuc.enc and texnanlc.enc
which produce all-uppercase and all-lowercase fonts
The principal uses for an all-uppercase font are page headers and
section heads. If these contain math, then macro-based uppercasing would
create unpleasant complications. Example:
afm2pl -p texnanuc ptmr8a ptmup8y
pltotf ptmup8y
For best results, you should add some letterspacing. In LaTeX, this is
best done with the microtype package; see the documentation of that
package. But it can also be done with afm2pl:
afm2pl -p texnanuc -m 100 ptmr8a ptmup8y
This requires caution; see above.
You can use this new font within the context of LaTeX font selection as
follows:
<preamble commands>
\makeatletter
{\nfss@catcodes
\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{ptm}{m}{upp}{<-> ptmup8y}{}}
\makeatother
...
\begin{document}
...
{\fontshape{upp}\selectfont uppercase text}
Note that upp is simply a newly made-up shape name.
The sz ligature ß
Note that the texnanuc encoding provides no glyph for the sz ligature ß;
you´ll either have to substitute ss or provide a macro-based solution.
The following code uses either the usual glyph or substitutes the
letters ss, depending on whether the glyph exists in the current font:
\def\ss{%
\setbox0\hbox{\char25}%
\ifnum\wd0=0 ss\else\box0\fi
}
In LaTeX, this code appears to work well enough, although on occasion
you may need to insert \protect. A better solution might involve the
sixth parameter of the \DeclareFontShape macro, but I failed to get that
to work.
AFM2PL, FONTINST AND ARTIFICIAL SMALLCAPS
Afm2pl doesn´t do virtual fonts. That means that for things such as
artificial smallcaps you have to turn elsewhere, e.g. to the fontinst
package, which is part of any mainstream TeX distribution.
Look under texmf/tex/fontinst for fontinst support files, which allow
you to generate a smallcaps font (tfm and vf files) from an
afm2pl-generated tfm file. This package only supports texnansi encoding.
There should be no real problem in doing the same for OT1 encoding.
However, there are several variations of the OT1 encoding to take care
of. Also, there are as far as I know no officially sanctioned PostScript
names for all the variations of the OT1 encoding; the fontinst names
contain spaces and are therefore not useable as PostScript names.
CHANGED IN VERSION 0.7.1
In order to avoid name conflicts, the .enc- and .lig files distributed
with afm2pl got afm2pl- prepended to their name. The program itself now
first searches for the thus prepended name. If the .enc- or .lig file is
not found it will look for the original filename. The renaming of the
afm2pl .enc files may require modification of some mapfiles.
URLS
The afm2pl homepage is http://tex.aanhet.net/afm2pl/.
The paper Font installation the shallow way[2] (EuroTeX 2006
Proceedings, published as TUGboat[3] issue 27.1) illustrates the use of
afm2pl.
NOTES
1. Except that arguably a narrowed Courier is less jarring than a full-
width Courier, when used in combination with a normal proportional
font. For Courier, choose .833 to match the width of cmtt. Better
yet, don't use Courier at all; most TeX distributions offer various
good replacements.
2. Font installation the shallow way
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-1/tb86kroonenberg-fonts.pdf
afm2pl is maintained as part of TeX Live.
30 August 2022 AFM2PL(1)
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