[OS X TeX] Font tools?

[Adam Lindsay]

TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List said this at Fri, 28 May 2004 20:00:01 -0400:

>What I'm looking for is a Type 1 equivalent to Eddy Kohler's otftotfm -- 
>Something that will create the necessary files, put them in the proper place 
>and write the necessary information to the appropriate configuration files.
>
>I have used fontinst -- kicking and screaming all the way ;>} -- and would 
>like a bit more convenient and as wonderful as otftotfm, but for Type 1
fonts.

Stephen, have you looked at texfont, from the ConTeXt community? 

It has great globbing support, and is mostly about slurping an entire
directory of fonts, re-encoding, and installing in the right parts of the
TeX directory structure (from a single command-line). It's amazing for
these tasks. It requires a bit of other work for a font to be "installed"
as a LaTeX user would expect. Namely:
* it doesn't use the Karl Berry naming scheme (I think that's a plus,
personally)
* it creates a .map file, but doesn't run updmap (also a feature, of
sorts--ConTeXt supports dynamic .map loading, and choosing .map files
manually can help avoid font naming conflicts)
* it doesn't write an .fd file. You'd have to make that yourself. (It
doesn't create ConTeXt's typescripts, either... I'd be interested in
collaborating with others to add this functionality.)

Some things I like:
* It does ttf and otf files as well, for folks who use pdttex.
* fondu on a Mac suitcase (for a font you own) is often all you need as a
preprocessing step for texfont. fondu, and texfont, and all the fonts
from that suitcase are installed.

Texfont is made by Hans Hagen from ConTeXt, but some of my enthusiasm
(full disclosure) is from having added some functionality (otftotfm
support, as it happens) to the increasingly complex Perl script.

You can find more details at:
http://www.pragma-ade.nl/general/manuals/mtexfont.pdf

>Is there such a beast?

Ah, reading through the digest a bit further, you discovered autofont. I
see that as a different beast (but similarly--and typically for Eddie--
brilliant in its approach). IIRC it does just-in-time installation based
on input from (user-generated) .fd files? Is that what you want?
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Adam T. Lindsay                      atl at comp.lancs.ac.uk
 Computing Dept, Lancaster University   +44(0)1524/594.537
 Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK             Fax:+44(0)1524/593.608
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