[OS X TeX] General Font Question

[Richard J Benish]

>  More than a decade later (you still wasn't born then)

Just because I'm "naive" and taking exams in school, it doesn't mean 
I'm young. I was born 8 years after the first transistor was invented 
(the year Einstein died).


>And a new programming language: PostScript. It introduced a new font 
>format. Both, hardware and software, were rapidly integrated into 
>the TeX community. And TeX continued to use TeX Font Metrics (TFM) 
>files to know the normalised dimensions of each glyph and to know 
>how much glue (positive or negative) could be poured between two 
>glyph boxes in a word (a longer box).
>
>Therefore, to be able to use an "external" font with TeX, you need 
>to generate TFM files. To be able to make a print of TeX's output or 
>to display it on screen you also need to know the mapping of the TeX 
>font name to the PostScript or TrueType or OpenType font name and 
>the encoding used inside that real font file. LuaTeX and XeTeX try 
>to use a modern operating system's font sub-system to acquire 
>necessary information about a font. 20 or 30 years ago no OS had 
>such a thing...

With my background in graphics I had some encounter with such things 
(e.g., Adobe Font Metrics). So I guessed it might be due to some such 
complication.

Thanks a bunch for spelling it out.

This would seem to mean that LaTex could still be modified to make 
font handling much easier than it presently is.

>
>I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but 
>they've always worked for me.
>				- Hunter S. Thompson
>

You really have a wonderful storehouse of poignant quotations!

Richard Benish