[OS X TeX] Font files clarified

[Peter Erwin]

>>  All
>>
>>  I once asked the question whether teTeX on the mac OSX needed to have
>>  fonts in pfb format, or whether pfa was possible as well. Ross M.
>>  replied that for pdftex pfb was needed, though not necessarily with
>>  dvips. This issue has come up on the pdftex list and I asked Thomas
>>  Esser for clarification. Here is his response:
>>
>>  (I had said) This all came up in a discussion of whether tetex needs to
>>  have font
>>  files in .pfb format or whether with the correct .map file it would be
>>  possible to use .pfa's or macintosh's .lwfn type font files.
>>
>>  I have no idea what .lwfn files are, but I just have tested that pdftex
>>  works with pfa files.
>>
>>  Thomas
>
>Well, I'm happy to stand corrected on PFAs; but with  t1utils ,
>it's very easy to go between .pfa and .pfb, so that's really a non-issue.
>
>If .lwfn  is just another name for .pfa, then they should work too,
>but if these are broken into resources, in the old MacOS (pre-X) way,
>then some conversion is needed;  t1utils  gives the means for this too,
>so you might as well go all the way to .pfb .

I believe the "lwfn" comes from the four-letter Mac filetype code: i.e., a
standard, old-fashioned Macintosh PostScript printer font file is a LWFN
file (most of which won't have ".lwfn" after the filename!).  These 
are *not* the
same as pfa (or pfb) files, but the t1utils (or the CMacTeX versions of them)
can be used to convert the font information in LWFN files into pfa or pfb
with no problem.

    -- 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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