[OS X TeX] A bit of everything (1/4)

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at me.com
Tue Mar 22 17:10:29 EDT 2011


Hello,

Some of you may remember me as a regular contributor to this list over the years 2001 to 2008. During that period, I often dealt with font-related issues either raised on the list or sent to me off-list. Most of the time this was done in haste and ended in half-baked solutions, which sort of worked.

A few months ago I decided to go back to this and tie up the loose ends, for those solutions I had been using myself afterwards. The immediate motivation was the purchase of up-to-date versions of the Lucida and MathTime fonts from PCTeX, to replace the versions purchased from Blue Sky Research in the mid-1990s and used extensively ever since (especially Lucida). The new versions needed to be installed in MacTeX, which required cleaning the accumulated stuff in /Library/TeX/Local and ~/Library/texmf.

Needless to say, this was a bad decision and turned out to be far more difficult and take far much time than expected. This started in early October 2010, has been carried at intervals since, and has only just been completed!

In the process a lot of issues were found and, hopefully, solved. Since this may be of interest to members of this list, here is an account of what I did. Adaptations are described in chronological order, which is also roughly an order of increasing complexity.

This is a one-off post: I re-subscribed just before posting this series of messages and will unsubscribe a couple of days after receiving it and verifying, by the list's response, that there aren't major problems. Please don't attempt to contact me for support, I simply can't afford the time.

Some adaptations involve FontForge <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> and Fondu <http://fondu.sourceforge.net/>. For the former, I used the deprecated but still working binary builds at <http://sourceforge.net/projects/fontforge/files/fontforge-executables/>.

In order to test the results, glyphs charts may be drawn by making a copy of testfont.tex, commenting out the line

	\ifx\noinit!\else\init\fi

calling the result batchtestfont.tex say then writing plain TeX files calling the metrics one by one, for example for GTA Mac Fonts in the third message of this series:

	\input batchtestfont

	\def\fontname{ec-hoefler-raw-HoeflerText}\startfont\table\vfill\eject
	\def\fontname{ec-hoefler-raw-HoeflerTextItalic}\startfont\table\vfill\eject
	\def\fontname{ec-hoefler-raw-HoeflerTextBlack}\startfont\table\vfill\eject
	\def\fontname{ec-hoefler-raw-HoeflerTextBlackItalic}\startfont\table\vfill\eject

	\end

For ligatures, here's a test file based on accentst.tex from the Blue Sky Research Lucida floppies from the early 1990s:

	\nopagenumbers
	\def\testligatures#1{%
	  \font\testfont=#1
	  \testfont
	  {\bf Test of #1}\smallskip
	  Standard Ligatures: fi fl ff ffi ffl\par
	  Standard pseudo ligatures: ``English'' - -- --- !` ?`\par
	  Extra pseudo ligatures: <<French>> ,,German''
	  \bigskip}

	\testligatures{pplr8y}
	\testligatures{pplr8t}
	\testligatures{rpplr}
	\testligatures{Palatino}

	\bye

and the output it gives

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A parallel series of messages has been posted to the Textures mailing list <http://email.esm.psu.edu/mailman/listinfo/textures>, describing similar adaptations for Textures.


Adobe Euro
==========

While most 21st century fonts contain the euro symbol, this was not the case with 20th century fonts. (In fact, my main motivation for purchasing a new version of the Lucida fonts was to get one with the euro symbol.)

Several solutions exist, described in section 7.8.7 of the LaTeX Companion 2nd edn. One such solution is the Adobe Euro font, containing the official euro glyph in Sans, Monospace and Serif shapes and Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic styles; see

	http://www.adobe.com/type/eurofont.html

This font matches well with common PostScript fonts. It's free, but must be downloaded from Adobe. A direct download link is

	ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/type/win/all/

Read eurofont.txt and get eurofont.exe, which is a Windows self-extracting ZIP archive. On OS X this can be extracted as easily as "unzip eurofont.exe".

TeX Live contains all the support files save the TFM files, plus two dedicated LaTeX packages europs and eurosans together with a third package eurofont which feels like overkill (see the discussion of the first two in the LaTeX Companion). eurosans is my favorite. Its doc provides detailed installation instructions for the font.

In short, get the TFM files from

	http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/euro/

then rename the PFB files as indicated in the included readme.txt, namely

	_1______.PFB  ->  zpeurs.pfb
	_1B_____.PFB  ->  zpeubs.pfb
	_1I_____.PFB  ->  zpeuris.pfb
	_1BI____.PFB  ->  zpeubis.pfb
	_2______.PFB  ->  zpeurt.pfb
	_2B_____.PFB  ->  zpeubt.pfb
	_2I_____.PFB  ->  zpeurit.pfb
	_2BI____.PFB  ->  zpeubit.pfb
	_3______.PFB  ->  zpeur.pfb
	_3B_____.PFB  ->  zpeub.pfb
	_3I_____.PFB  ->  zpeuri.pfb
	_3BI____.PFB  ->  zpeubi.pfb

and copy the TFM and PFB files at the appropriate places inside /Library/TeX/Local or ~/Library/texmf. That's all!


MarVoSym
========

Another font containing the official euro symbol is MarVoSym <http://www.marvosym.com>; see sections 7.8.3 and 7.8.7 of the LaTeX Companion 2nd edn. This is a nice TrueType font containing all sorts of interesting symbols, originally for engineering but now much wider-ranging.

The font has been converted to PostScript format and a LaTeX support package prepared for accessing its glyphs. This is included in TeX Live already. This work is, however, based on version 2 of the font, dating back to 2000, whereas the current TrueType version is 3.1, introduced in 2007. In between some symbols have been redesigned, others added or removed; see <http://www.marvosym.com/history.html>. Here are glyph charts of the two versions:


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If you're willing to experiment with MarVoSym v3, just open marvosym.ttf from the above site in FontForge, go to File > Generate Fonts and select "PS Type 1 (Binary)" making sure the option "Output TFM & Enc" is checked. Rename the resulting marvosym.tfm to umvs.tfm, which the name used in the LaTeX package. Then install marvosym.pfb and umvs.tfm at the appropriate places inside /Library/TeX/Local or ~/Library/texmf.

In addition, you'll need an updated version of the LaTeX package marvosym.sty itself. One such version is attached. For each glyph the PostScript name in the list marvosym.pdf from <http://www.marvosym.com> has been used for the associated LaTeX command. Compatibility has been maintained as far as allowed by the differences between versions (given for example that there are now two forms of the University of Bochum logo instead of three, and that the e-commerce symbol has been replaced by the estimated symbol).

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Monotype
========

Periodically the question arises on this list of LaTeX support for the Times New Roman and Arial fonts. This seems to be caused by the insistence of some publishers and conference organizers that these fonts be used.

My understanding is that the instructions are written by people working on Windows and using for the fonts the names they are familiar with, Times New Roman and Arial. But these people wouldn't object if Times and Helvetica, or their URW clones from TeX Live, were used instead. I know that there are subtle differences between Times New Roman and Arial on one hand, and Times and Helvetica on the other hand, but for most uses these differences are insignificant.

However, there are cases when the publishers or proceeding editors really mean Times New Roman and Arial, or use preflight software checking for them.

The modern solution for addressing this issue is fontspec with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, allowing the use of the Times New Roman and Arial included in OS X. It may happen, however, that additional LaTeX packages must also be used, which are incompatible with XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX.

An alternative solution lies in the font support files prepared by Sebastian Rahtz in 1998 and put on CTAN at

	http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/psfonts/monotype/

Back in 2003 I downloaded them from there. At some point between then and now they were removed. Attached is a slightly modified copy.

Beware though: for using these files, you must perform a preliminary conversion of the OS X fonts to PFB format, which may raise license issues. This is only a fall-back solution when the much nicer fontspec route is not an option.

Open the font suitcases in FontForge, go to File > Generate Fonts and select "PS type 1 (Binary)", then rename the resulting files as follows:

	TimesNewRomanPSMT.pfb			-> mnsr8a.pfb
	TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT.pfb		-> mnsri8a.pfb
	TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT.pfb		-> mnsb8a.pfb
	TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT.pfb	-> mnsbi8a.pfb

	ArialMT.pfb				-> ma1r8a.pfb
	Arial-ItalicMT.pfb			-> ma1ri8a.pfb
	Arial-BoldMT.pfb			-> ma1b8a.pfb
	Arial-BoldItalicMT.pfb			-> ma1bi8a.pfb
	Arial-Black.pfb				-> ma1c8a.pfb

	ArialNarrow.pfb				-> ma1r8an.pfb
	ArialNarrow-Italic.pfb			-> ma1ri8an.pfb
	ArialNarrow-Bold.pfb			-> ma1b8an.pfb
	ArialNarrow-BoldItalic.pfb		-> ma1bi8an.pfb

	ArialRoundedMTBold.pfb			-> mhrb8a.pfb

Place the files at the appropriate places inside /Library/TeX/Local or ~/Library/texmf, then run, for a system-wide install in texmf-local

	sudo mktexlsr
	sudo -H updmap-sys --enable Map mns.map
	sudo -H updmap-sys --enable Map ma1.map

or for a user-specific install in ~/Library/texmf,

	updmap --enable Map mns.map
	updmap --enable Map ma1.map

You're done!

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Mathematica
===========

Two or three times the question has arisen on this list of using the Mathematica math fonts with LaTeX. The fonts are free and can be downloaded from Wolfram Research, in a variety of formats and versions, at

	http://support.wolfram.com/technotes/fonts/macintosh/latestfonts.html
	http://support.wolfram.com/technotes/fonts/windows/latestfonts.html
	http://support.wolfram.com/technotes/fonts/unix/latestfonts.html

The origin of the fonts is described in a Mathematica Journal article

	http://www.mathematica-journal.com/issue/v7i2/features/kuzniarek/

A LaTeX support package has been prepared by Jens-Peer Kuska at

	http://phong.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~kuska/wri_texmf_4.2.zip

It contains errors but won't be updated, since the author passed away a year and a half ago as announced at

	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica/browse_thread/thread/c05cf15a9bb7c193

The fonts and the package have been corrected by the Wolfram research team and the corrected versions are included within the Mathematica application, at

	Mathematica.app/SystemFiles/Fonts
	Mathematica.app/SystemFiles/IncludeFiles/TeX/texmf

The version of Mathematica for which the package was prepared is 4.2. Here's what you have to do if you want to install the fonts and don't have Mathematica:

- Get the package from the URL above, then get the fonts in PFA format from

	http://support.wolfram.com/technotes/fonts/macintosh/files/MacOSX_Type1_42.sit.hqx

- Take the files Mathematica*.{pfa,afm} and copy them onto the package, replacing the existing versions: the versions in the package are faulty. For example, Mathematica3Mono-Bold.{pfa,afm} are copies of Mathematica4Mono-Bold.{pfa,afm} instead of the proper Mathematica3Mono-Bold.{pfa,afm}.

- Open wolfram.map in an editor and replace all occurrences of .pfb by .pfa in the first part of the file (the one dealing with the Mathematica fonts, not Janson, Garamond, Optima or Futura).

Then perform the usual installation routine (file placement, mktexlsr and updmap).


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