[OS X TeX] TeXniscope v0.3.3

[Massimiliano Gubinelli]

On 6 Dec 2004, at 17:15, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 6 Dec 2004, at 3:27 pm, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
>
>> For those of you who are interested in the problems of integrating 
>> TeX with OSX I packaged a small source code showing that it is 
>> possible to render TeX fonts (in the OpenType variant) using standard 
>> systems calls (i.e. without external libraries like FreeType)
>
> This is, of course, exactly what xdv2pdf (the back-end of XeTeX) does. 
> Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be possible to use .pfb fonts 
> directly (I'm considering some "indirect" approaches), and if one does 
> the simplest type of .pfb->.otf conversion with a tool such as 
> FontForge, it's difficult for an OS X app to determine the default 
> encoding vector in the original .pfb.
>

I wondered something like that was under XeTeX. I also experimented 
with FontForge (using the symbolic encoding: .ttf.sym ) but I had 
problems with encoding. (Indeed as far as I understand, when the font 
it is loaded it is understood as a unicode font even if the encoding is 
not correct). Maybe it is possible to write FontForge scripts to 
produce on the fly (like PK bitmaps) the needed fonts.

Since here you are the most experienced programmer on this topic would 
you like to write some notes for us (me?) about your experience on this 
problem.

I was thinking to write a native dvi viewer using this approach and I 
was just thinking that the easiest way would be to take the xdv2pdf 
sources as a starting point... Is the licensing problem really hard?


best,
max


> JK
>
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