[OS X TeX] altpdflatex and font problems

[Gerben Wierda]

> I have recently converted an Adobe minion otf font into the requisite
> pfb, afm, etc. files and installed it for use under Gerban's teTex
> installation. I've messed with the mapping a little bit, so that, for
> instance, an alternative swashed "k" is in place of the regular "k",
> and modified the afm/tfm files accordingly. So, except for these
> changes, I've reproduced the 8x encoding in the first 256 slots of the
> pfb file created from minion.otf by otftotfm. This runs perfectly on
> pdflatex. Unfortunately it doesn't run fine on altpdflatex, under
> either TeXShop or iTexMac. In particular, what doesn't work are any of
> the glyphs that I've copied by hand into the spots to create that 8x
> encoding -- not the lower case figures, for instance, of the ffi and
> ffl ligatures, nor the whimsical "k" substitutions I made. I must use
> altpdflatex, however, as I use a tree-drawing program that needs to PS.
>
> Does anyone have an idea why running through postscript -- that's the
> central difference between altpdflatex and pdflatex, right? -- would
> have this effect?

I have no idea, but note that dvips and pdftex use different map files, so
if your changes included changing map files and/or adding map files to
pdftex.cfg (instead of via the updmap system) they could be absent from
your dvips (altpdftex) setup.

altpdftex does:
1. .tex -> .dvi using TeX (give it a dvi file and it will skip this step)
2. .dvi -> .ps using dvips
3. .ps -> .pdf with a distiller (ghostscript by default)

G
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