afm2pl is an open source font utility for easy installation of commercial fonts in TeX.
Afm2pl is meant to be a partial alternative to afm2tfm, on which it is based. Its default action is to convert an afm file to a pl file, which in its turn can be converted to a tfm file, with preservation of kerns and ligatures (with afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is possible only in a roundabout way).
For text fonts, Y&Y's texnansi is the recommended encoding to be used with afm2pl. This encoding gives you a good character set with all the more important accented characters and many typographic symbols available as single characters, without a need for either virtual fonts or a separate text companion font.
Most TeX distributions contain full support for texnansi for both the LaTeX- and the Context macro packages.
The distribution also contains uppercased and lowercased versions of texnansi, to allow font-based rather than macro-based uppercasing and lowercasing.
An all-caps font looks better with some letterspacing. Versions >=0.5 offer this facility, though with some caveats. However, current versions of pdftex can add letterspacing to existing fonts, which is a much better way to go about it. For LaTeX, see the Microtype package.
Since afm2pl has been integrated into TeX Live, we no longer offer it here for download.
2009/06/21