[OS X TeX] Esstix (was: ANNOUNCE mbtimes font package)

[Bruno Voisin]

Le lundi 1 avril 2002, à 06:06 PM, Michel Bovani a écrit :

> Hmmm...
> If you look at the property list of the tfm of an ex tex font (like 
> cmex),
> you will find something like

[snip]

> And now look at esstix afm file: this font claims to be AdobeStandard
> encoded (!), and of course, most of the information that you need to 
> make a
> tfm font is not actually present. So it is not impossible to make a tex
> system with esstix, but it should be a lot of work for the ex font.
> Moreover, I am not quite sure one should be allowed to convert these 
> fonts
> in a mac format.

Actually that's not what I meant: I'm quite happy with fonts in .pfb 
format, which TeXShop can use. I see only two reasons for converting 
them to Mac format:

- Use with TeX in Mac OS 9, but in my case I launch Classic only when I 
absolutely have to and with greatest reluctance.

- Use with other Mac applications (e.g. Illustrator), for inserting math 
in figures. I think (if I understood well) Ross Moore mentioned in an 
earlier posting a LaTeX package, which can do in .pdf format everything 
psfrag can do in .ps format, so provided that is true .pfb fonts would 
again be appropriate.

That being said, the distribution esstix.zip contains all 17 esstix 
fonts in .pfb format and also in Windows TrueType .ttf format, together 
with a folder resource.frk which I suppose contains corresponding 
resource forks; so maybe creating Mac TrueType fonts (apart from 
copyright issues) would be accessible to a font expert.

Another issue is to create .tfm files. esstix.zip containing .afm files, 
isn't it possible to convert them to .tfm format using afm2tfm (in 
/Library/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin5.3/afm2tfm) or fontinst? But 
then, of course, one would need to write LaTeX font driver .fd files and 
create control sequences to access each character in the 17 fonts (like, 
for example, phonetic alphabets) individually.

But, after all, maybe that's what Elsevier is planning to do anyway? My 
original posting was more a request for information, in case anybody had 
heard of plans from Elsevier or a LaTeX guru.

Bruno Voisin


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