afm2pl is an open source font utility for easy installation of commercial fonts in TeX.
afm2pl is meant to be a alternative to afm2tfm, on which it is based. Its default action is to convert an afm file with preservation of kerns and ligatures (with afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is possible only in a roundabout way).
Since the 2004 edition, TeX Live (TeX Live) includes afm2pl.
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. In versions >=0.5, letterspacing is possible, though with some caveats.
Siep Kroonenberg