Name

afm2pl — convert AFM font metrics to TeX pl font metrics

Synopsis

afm2pl [-p encoding_file ] [-o] [-e extension_factor ] [-s slant_factor ] [-f font_dimensions ] [-k] [-m letter_spacing ] [-l ligkern_spec ] [-L ligkern_spec ] [-n] input_file[.afm] [output_file[.pl]]

afm2pl [--help] | [--version]

Description

afm2pl converts an afm (Adobe Font Metric) file into a pl (Property List) file, which in its turn can be converted to a tfm (TeX Font Metric) file. It normally preserves kerns and ligatures, but also offers additional control over them.

afm2pl is meant to be a partial replacement for afm2tfm, on which it is based. With afm2tfm, preserving kerns and ligatures is possible only in a roundabout way, and handling of them is hard-wired.

For text fonts, Y&Y's texnansi is a good encoding to be used with afm2pl. Its character set includes all the accented characters likely to be needed for Western languages, plus many typographic symbols, without a need for either virtual fonts or a separate text companion font.

Full LaTeX support for this encoding is available in the form of the texnansi package, which is already part of TeX Live and teTeX. These distributions also contain the encoding file texnansi.enc.

The distribution contains uppercased and lowercased versions of texnansi, viz. texnanuc and texnanlc, to allow font-based rather than macro-based uppercasing and lowercasing, and the familiar old ot1 encoding plus some variations in PostScript .enc format (I included these because they seem to be absent from teTeX/TeX Live). However, check your mapfiles if you have old afm2pl-generated fonts using these.

Return value: 0 if no error; a negative number indicating the number of missing glyphs if conversion was otherwise successfull but glyphs are missing, and 1 in case of error.

Options

-p encoding_file

The default is the encoding specified in the afm file, which had better match the encoding in the fontfile (pfa or pfb). If afm2pl-name.enc exists, afm2pl will use this file instead of name.enc, unless an option -n is given. The generated mapfile entry (see below) instructs pdftex or the dvi driver to reencode the font on the fly. On-the-fly reencoding does not require virtual fonts.

-o

Use octal for all character codes in the pl file.

-e extend_factor

Widen or narrow characters by extend_factor. Default is 1.0 (natural width). Not recommended[1].

-s slant_factor

Oblique (slant) characters by slant_factor. Not recommended either.

-f font_dimensions

The value is either the keyword afm2tfm or a comma-separated list of up to five integers. The parameters are listed below, with their defaults and their value when the afm2tfm keyword is specified. ‘Space’ means the width of a space in the target font, except of course in the last row. Keep in mind that the design size is 1000, and that all numbers must be nonnegative integers.

Font dimension Default value Afm2tfm value
stretch space div 2 300 × extend_factor
shrink space div 3 100 × extend_factor
extra space space div 3 missing
quad 2 × width of ‘0’ 1000 × extend_factor
space (space source font) × extend_factor (space source font) × extend_factor

For fixed-pitch fonts, different values apply:

Font dimension Default value Afm2tfm value
stretch 0 0
shrink 0 0
extra space space missing
quad 2 × character width 1000 × extend_factor
space character width character width

Specify just a non-default stretch and shrink with e.g. 150,70 and just a non-default extra space with ,,10.

-k

Keep original ligatures. This option only has effect in combination with positive letterspacing; see the section on letterspacing and extra ligkern info.

-m letter_spacing

Letterspace by letter_spacing/1000 em (integer). This is useful for making all-caps typesetting look better. Try a value of e.g. 50 or 100. But see the section on letterspacing and extra ligkern info for details. A better alternative, though, is letting pdftex do the letterspacing. The microtype package gives LaTeX users access to this feature.

-l ligkern_spec, -L ligkern_spec

See the section on extra ligkern info for details.

-n

No prefix. For .enc- and .lig files, the program normally first prefixes the name with `afm2pl-'. Only if the prefixed filename is not found, will it search for the original filename. This option prevents searching for the prefixed filename.

-V

Verbose. If turned on, it reports the number of missing glyphs to stderr and their names to stdout.

--help

Display a short usage message.

--version

Display the version number of afm2pl.

Extra ligkern info

Most users are well-advised to leave this mess alone and to accept the default behavior.

The ligatures and kerns present in the afm file can be modified in various ways. Default, the encoding file is scanned for extra ligkern specifications, whose format will be described below. If there are no ligkern specifications in the encoding file, then extra ligkern specifications will be read from a file [afm2pl-]default.lig. A value of 0 for ligkern_spec means that the ligatures and kerns from the afm file won't be tampered with and a value of 1 specifies default behavior. One can also specify a comma-separated list of files with extra ligkerns specs.

If afm2pl is compiled with the kpathsea library, then these files will be searched for under $TEXMF/fonts/lig.

Note that ligatures and kerns are hints for the typesetting application; there is no need to download this information to the printer or to make it available to a dvi driver.

The parser for ligkern info has been inherited from afm2tfm virtually without change. A ligkern specification can have one of the following forms:

glyph_name1 glyph_name2 lig_op glyph_name3 ;

This specifies a ligature. Possible values for lig_op are =:, |=:, |=:>, =:|, =:|>, |=:|, |=:|> and |=:|>>. These correspond to LIG, /LIG, /LIG>, LIG/, LIG/>, /LIG/, /LIG/>, /LIG/>> in .pl syntax; see the pltotf documentation and the .lig files in the distribution.

glyph_name1 <> glyph_name2 ;

Kern glyph_name1 as glyph_name2.

glyph_name1 {} glyph_name2 ;

Remove the kern between glyph_name1 and glyph_name2. A value of * for either glyph name is interpreted as a wildcard.

|| = glyph ;

Set the (right) boundary character to glyph. glyph may be either a glyphname or a slot in the encoding vector. Choosing a glyph which doesn't occur in the output encoding is equivalent to not specifying a boundarychar at all. It is ok to pick an encoded glyphname which does not occur in the afm. In fact, this is what default.lig does: || = cwm ;.

You can copy the kerns of an unencoded character to the boundarychar. Below, space is the unencoded character:

|| <> space ;

This ligkern specification should occur before the one that deletes space kerns.

A ligkern specification should be contained within one line. One line may contain several ligkern specifications, separated by spaces. Note that ; (space followed by semicolon) is considered part of the ligkern specification. See the lig files included in this distribution. Example:

one {} * ; * {} one ; two {} * ; * {} two ;

Lines with ligkern specifications inside an encoding file should start with % LIGKERN . Ligkern specifications in a lig file may optionally start this way.

Letterspacing and extra ligkern info

Letterspacing has various side-effects for ligkern info. Instead of simply applying the extra ligkern info (see previous section), the following is done:

Font-based upper- and lowercasing

The distribution includes encoding vectors texnanuc.enc and texnanlc.enc which produce all-uppercase and all-lowercase fonts

The principal uses for an all-uppercase font are page headers and section heads. If these contain math, then macro-based uppercasing would create unpleasant complications. Example:

afm2pl -p texnanuc ptmr8a ptmup8y
pltotf ptmup8y

For best results, you should add some letterspacing. In LaTeX, this is best done with the microtype package; see the documentation of that package. But it can also be done with afm2pl:

afm2pl -p texnanuc -m 100 ptmr8a ptmup8y

This requires caution; see above.

You can use this new font within the context of LaTeX font selection as follows:


<preamble commands>
\makeatletter
{\nfss@catcodes
\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{ptm}{m}{upp}{<-> ptmup8y}{}}
\makeatother
...
\begin{document}
...
{\fontshape{upp}\selectfont uppercase text}

Note that upp is simply a newly made-up shape name.

Urls

The afm2pl homepage is http://tex.aanhet.net/afm2pl/.

The paper Font installation the shallow way (EuroTeX 2006 Proceedings, published as TUGboat issue 27.1) illustrates the use of afm2pl.



[1] Except that arguably a narrowed Courier is less jarring than a full-width Courier, when used in combination with a normal proportional font. For Courier, choose .833 to match the width of cmtt. Better yet, don't use Courier at all; most TeX distributions offer various good replacements.