Fonts &c. (was Re: [OS X TeX] Fonts included with Textures?)

[Peter Erwin]

William Adams said:
>Adrian asked:
>>I fear this response muddies some already muddy water. The issue was
>>simple: do Macs' normal .pfa outline fonts work in teTeX or do they
>need
>>to be converted to .pfb?
>
>Macs don't have ``normal .pfa outline fonts'', but funky, ``LWFN'' fonts
>which are hidden away in the resource fork so that one can't open them
>up with a standard text editor. I forget the specific details of whether
>or no they're ASCII.
>
>>It is a simple question which should have a
>>simple answer.

If by "normal .pfa outline fonts" you mean -- as William pointed out -- the
"LWFN" font files, then the answer is, put simply:

    No.  They need to be converted to .pfb

(From what other people have said, it appears that .pfa format may work as
well, but I haven't tried it.  All the PostScript fonts which come with teTeX
appear to be in .pfb format, and the various .map files that dvips --- and thus
pdftex as well, I believe --- assume .pfb format.  So the default 
format seems to be
.pfb.  Since it's relatively easy to convert between the two formats using the
"t1utils" programs (see below), I'd just stick with .pfb unless 
there's a compelling
reason to use .pfa.)

>You should use the extant tools (as bundled with OzTeX, or CMacTeX) for
>converting LWFN files to a format which makes sense on platforms which
>aren't burdened by a proprietary resource-fork oriented filesystem. Said
>tools also automagically convert to .pfa presumably, if not, check with
>Frank Siegert at www.wizards.de/~frank and see if he's ported his font
>conversion utility.

The necessary tools are actually part of the teTeX installation, though they're
command-line only and thus less friendly than, say, the CMacTeX versions.
They can convert back and forth between .pfa and .pfb, *and* they can
convert Macintosh (LWFN) font files to *either* pfa *or* pfb.  Here's
an example of how to use them.  I'll use the MathTime "MTEX" font (which
I got in Mac format from Blue Sky) as an example, but it could be anything.

First, make a copy of the font file and convert it to BinHex or MacBinary, or
similar format (see the man page for "t1unmac" to see what it accepts).
You can also operate on the "raw" resource fork, which can be generated from
the font file so:

% cp MTEX/rsrc mtex.rsrc

(That's right, "filename/rsrc" will extract the resource fork from a 
Macintosh file.
This is a bit of a hack -- I've read that this feature may not survive in
future versions of MacOS X, but there are other command-line utilities which
can extract resource forks; this is just the simplest I'm aware of.)

Then use the "t1unmac" program -- part of the teTeX installation -- to generate
a pfa or pfb file ("man t1unmac" to learn more about it):

% t1unmac --pfb --raw mtex.rsrc mtex.pfb

or, e.g.

% t1unmac --pfb MTEX.hqx mtex.pfa

(using "--pfa" instead of "--pfb" generates .pfa versions)

    -- Peter
-- 
=============================================================
Peter Erwin                   Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
erwin at ll.iac.es               C/ Via Lactea s/n
tel. +34 922 605 244          38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

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