Introduction
I came across a set of fonts to download that were available as *.otf files. Namely the cooperate identity fonts from the European Space Agency. These were available to download here: http://www.esa.int/identity/04T_fonts_01.html.
I wanted to use this font in an animated graphic I previously did with LaTeX -> dvips -> ps2pdf.
There mainly used the packages pst-solides3d and pstricks-add and animate. The animate package allows the creation of interactive movie like objects to be embedded in a pdf.
There are plenty of people that asked how to install (or use) such otf files with LaTeX. Almost all answers suggested the use of XeTeX or LuaTeX instead of the classical LaTeX or PdfTeX programs.
For example:
I did not further tried to make the animate package running with XeTeX because of the following comment on a stackexchange question:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/340134/animate-with-pstricks-and-xelatex
Herbert (Which I think is Herbert Voß, a developer of PSTricks) left the following comment:
uselatex->dvips->ps2pdf. Animations are not really possible withxelatex
With some googling I came across the installfont package that should be able to convert otf fonts permanently for a TeX installation. This package is however not included with the MikTeX distribution but only with the TeX Live distribution. The intallfont package is a bash script that should convert and install otf files for a TeX system by calling appropriate programs. Of cause it failed, also after a lot of reconfiguration, renaming and what not. So every single step of what this script tries to do, had to be examined carefully. The steps taken follow:
Converting into Adobe font metric files
The first thing the fontinstall script does is to convert the otf files into tfm files. At that point I could not get any results that would render the font in question. So I was searching for some other conversion tool that may help. I found Fontlab's TransType which provided a 2 weeks trial installation. The tool looked great: I just dragged the otf files into the GUI and the font was shown in all 4 family members that were provided with the font.- NotesEsaBol.otf
- NotesEsaBolIta.otf
- NotesEsaReg.otf
- NotesEsaRegIta.otf
The resulting files were adobe font metrics (afm):
- NotesEsa.afm
- NotesEsa-Bold.afm
- NotesEsa-BoldItalic.afm
- NotesEsa-Italic.afm
Rename the file pairs into Karl Berry scheme
The installfont script tries to rename the files into the Karl Berry scheme based on keywords in the file name. E.g. if "Bold" or "bold" is somewhere in the filename it would be renamed with the fontcut identifier bc. It is quite a big chunk of the script to do that. However the result was not quite what I would expect. Probably some keywords are not matching, e.g. Italic is not in the search list. So I renamed them by hand.What that Karl Berry scheme is, is explained in the documentation that comes with the fontinstall package. In short its like this:
fxxy(y)zz.pfb
f - supplier (type foundry)
xx - typeface y(y) - weights/variants (font cut)
zz - font encoding
Together f and xx form the font family. I chose the font family to be esa, thus "e" as the supplier and "sa" as the typeface. The font cut I chose according to the file e.g.: "bi" (bold italic) for the NotesEsa-BoldItalic.afm file.
Here a link of the documention available at the time of writing: ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/support/installfont/installfont.pdf
For example i found the Helvetica font in the MiKTeX installation under fonts\afm\adobe\helvetic with the filename phvb8a.afm. Thus "p" for Adobe, "hv" for Helvetica, "b" for bold and "8a" for AdobeStandardEncoding.
In the fontinst package (which is not the same as the installfont package) documentation in doc\fontinst\manual\intro98.pdf, some other font encodings are listed. E.g. "8t" is symbolic for TeX 8-bit text (T1) encoding, and "8r" is symbolic for TeX 8-bit 'raw' (TeXBase1) encoding.
An internet link to find it faster (at least at time of writing): http://www.let.rug.nl/alfa/tex/tetex30/fontinst/manual/intro98.pdf
- NotesEsa.afm -> esar8a.afm
- NotesEsa-Bold.afm -> esab8a.afm
- NotesEsa-BoldItalic.afm -> esabi8a.afm
- NotesEsa-Italic.afm -> esari8a.afm
Creating metrics and virtual fonts
Next, property list files, virtual property list files and font descriptions are extracted from the Adobe font metric (afm) files. This is done by the tex system itself. As such I used a tex file (an example from the fontinst manual) and compiled it with tex.
The contents of the esa-drv.tex file:
\input fontinst.sty
\recordtransforms{esa-rec.tex}
\latinfamily{esa}{}
\endrecordtransforms
\bye
This file resembles a minimal file that combines a bunch of common stuff done. It searches for the font family in files that are located in the same directory beginning with "esa". From the remaining file name of the found files the fontcut and encoding is taken (assumed).
After the command I ran the following command:
>tex esa-drv.tex
This created a bunch of new files:
| esab8a.afm | ot1esa.fd | esab8a.mtx | esab8a.pl | esab7t.vpl | esa-drv.log |
| esabi8a.afm | t1esa.fd | esab8r.mtx | esab8r.pl | esab8c.vpl | esa-drv.dvi |
| esar8a.afm | ts1esa.fd | esabi8a.mtx | esabi8a.pl | esab8t.vpl | esa-rec.tex |
| esari8a.afm | 8resa.fd | esabi8r.mtx | esabi8r.pl | esabc7t.vpl | |
| esabo8r.mtx | esabo8r.pl | esabc8t.vpl | |||
| esar8a.mtx | esar8a.pl | esabi7t.vpl | |||
| esar8r.mtx | esar8r.pl | esabi8c.vpl | |||
| esari8a.mtx | esari8a.pl | esabi8t.vpl | |||
| esari8r.mtx | esari8r.pl | esabo7t.vpl | |||
| esaro8r.mtx | esaro8r.pl | esabo8c.vpl | |||
| esabo8t.vpl | |||||
| esar7t.vpl | |||||
| esar8c.vpl | |||||
| esar8t.vpl | |||||
| esarc7t.vpl | |||||
| esarc8t.vpl | |||||
| esari7t.vpl | |||||
| esari8c.vpl | |||||
| esari8t.vpl | |||||
| esaro7t.vpl | |||||
| esaro8c.vpl | |||||
| esaro8t.vpl |
Note, the tex command did not run smoothly; a lot of errors warnings and the enter button needed to be pressed to continue.
This included the generation of the font property list (pl) files of the orignal fontcuts in 8a and 8r encoding + two additional fontcuts: BoldOblique (bo) and RegularOblique (ro). To each of those also a metrics (mtx) file was created. This is supposedly only a helper file of the fontinst package to make the afm files readable by TeX.Then there are a bunch of virtual font property list (vpl) files, that are probably generated fontcuts and encodings of the fontcuts that were provided. I would have expexted the bo and ro fontcuts to be also a vpl file though.
A good source of information here is probably the book "Font & Encodings" from Yannis Haralambous. I only looked at some previews of it.
https://books.google.nl/books?id=qrElYgVLDwYC&pg=PA281&lpg=PA281&dq=mtx+latex+file&source=bl&ots=4iwJt-20OO&sig=VVJxHCPNs8nFNkXza90DfmtUozE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwin5cO_8obVAhXNUlAKHVGwDsgQ6AEIWTAJ#v=onepage&q=mtx%20latex%20file&f=false
Creating TeX font metrics and virtual font files
Here it got really confusing for me: so many files, nothing working, not testable. So I asked the almighty internet for help:https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/375335/why-should-one-use-pltotf-and-vptovf-to-intall-a-font
Next step generate TeX font metrics (tmf) files from the property list (pl) files with the pltotf tool. And then generate additional tmf files from the virtual font property list (vpl) files. Also virtual font (vf) files were generated from the
for file in *.pl; do pltotf $file ${file%pl}tfm; done
for file in *.vpl; do vptovf $file ${file%vpl}vf ${file%vpl}tfm; done
I did that from a cygwin terminal because the above is bash language that is not understood by a Windows terminal. If I would not know about cygwin, I would have issued the commands on each file manually, or would have written a batch file, probably. E.g.:
pltotf esab8a.pl esab8a.tfmpltotf esab8r.pl esab8r.tfm...
vptovfesab7t.vpl esab7t.vfesab7t.tfm
vptovf esab8c.vpl esab8c.vf esab8c.tfm ... These files were generated with the pltotf command:
| esab8a.tfm | ||
| esari8a.tfm | ||
| esari8r.tfm | ||
| esaro8r.tfm | ||
| esab8r.tfm | ||
| esabi8a.tfm | ||
| esabi8r.tfm | ||
| esabo8r.tfm | ||
| esar8a.tfm | ||
| esar8r.tfm |
And these files were generated with the vptovf command:
| esab7t.tfm | esab7t.vf |
| esab8c.tfm | esab8c.vf |
| esab8t.tfm | esab8t.vf |
| esabc7t.tfm | esabc7t.vf |
| esabc8t.tfm | esabc8t.vf |
| esabi7t.tfm | esabi7t.vf |
| esabi8c.tfm | esabi8c.vf |
| esabi8t.tfm | esabi8t.vf |
| esabo7t.tfm | esabo7t.vf |
| esabo8c.tfm | esabo8c.vf |
| esabo8t.tfm | esabo8t.vf |
| esar7t.tfm | esar7t.vf |
| esar8c.tfm | esar8c.vf |
| esar8t.tfm | esar8t.vf |
| esarc7t.tfm | esarc7t.vf |
| esarc8t.tfm | esarc8t.vf |
| esari7t.tfm | esari7t.vf |
| esari8c.tfm | esari8c.vf |
| esari8t.tfm | esari8t.vf |
| esaro7t.tfm | esaro7t.vf |
| esaro8c.tfm | esaro8c.vf |
| esaro8t.tfm |
Testing the created fonts
The answer of a question in the tex stackexchange group gave me some insides of the possibility to actually use the generated font support files without installing them to the MiKTex system.https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/265840/texlive-installing-a-type-1-font
Here is my test.ltx file that I used:
\documentclass{letter}Creating the device independent (dvi) file with latex:
\begin{document}
\fontfamily{esa}\fontseries{m}\fontshape{n}\selectfont
Test sentence.
\end{document}
>latex test.ltx
Succeeded without error. Next converting the dvi into a postscript (ps) file.
>dvips text.dvi
The created pdf turned out to look like this:
Note that I did the step of creating the pdf after installation of the map file.
It seems not possible for the dvips program to map the font files without installing the map file.
Correcting the Adobe font metrics files
After discovering that the afm files generated by the TransType program are corruptes, I manually corrected the files.In particular a semicolon of some lines were missing, e.g.:
C -1 ; WX 605 ; N Aogonek ; B 15 -200 590 710 ;This were in total 4 occurances in each file. Changed the second line into e.g.:
C -1 ; WX 280 ; N CR ; B 0 0 0 0
C -1 ; WX 475 ; N Cacute ; B 60 -10 443 910 ;
C -1 ; WX 280 ; N CR ; B 0 0 0 0 ;Invoking the tex interpreter on esa-drv.tex again, gave no errors this time (no need to press the return key several times). A lot of warnings were however still issued, like e.g.:
Warning: missing glyph `Gamma'.The generation of vf and tfm files with pltotf and vftopfissued still quite some "sorry's"
Warning: missing glyph `Theta'.
Warning: missing glyph `Lambda'.
Sorry, LIGTABLE too long for me to handle (line 10198).And ended with:
(KRN D 107 R -0.005) (COMMENT k)
Sorry, LIGTABLE too long for me to handle (line 10199).
(KRN D 108 R -0.005) (COMMENT l)
LIG character examined by '214 had no CHARACTER spec.
Sorry, I haven't room for so many ligature/kern pairs!
All ligatures will be cleared.
I had to round some heights by 0000000 units.
I had to round some depths by 0000000 units.
Creating a map file
The installfont script, in its next step creates a tex file that should create a map file that provides information for the dvi interpreter a mapping between fonts used in the TeX world and the binary fonts provided in extra files.Creatated the esa-map.tex file with following contents:
\input finstmsc.styRunning tex on the file produxes the esa.map files:
\resetstr{PSfontsuffix}{.pfb}
\adddriver{dvips}{esa.map}
\input esa-rec.tex
\donedrivers
\bye
>tex esa-map.tex
The contents of the esa.map file are:
esar8r NotesEsa <[8r.enc <esar8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont "
esaro8r NotesEsa <[8r.enc <esar8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont 0.167 SlantFont "
esari8r NotesEsa-Italic <[8r.enc <esari8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont "
esab8r NotesEsa-Bold <[8r.enc <esab8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont "
esabo8r NotesEsa-Bold <[8r.enc <esab8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont 0.167 SlantFont "
esabi8r NotesEsa-BoldItalic <[8r.enc <esabi8a.pfb " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont "
So it does kind off associate a specific Adobe font binary (pfb) in "8a" (TeX 8-bit text (T1)) encoding with "8r" (TeX 8-bit 'raw' (TeXBase1)) encoding.
Creating a portable document format (pdf)
Next steps are to create a PostScript (ps) file from the dvi file. And following a pdf from the ps file.Apparently the latex program used the mtx files to determine the space and position needed by each character. The dvitops program then puts the actual characters at those reserved spots from the pfb files. The dvips program came up with some errors:
ap is an unknown METAFONT mode.
dvips: Font esar8r not found; characters will be left blank.This error appears to to the lack of the
Installing the font and support files
Some information on how to install, and also use, the generated font I used some of the folling information:https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/88423/manual-font-installation
As done by the installfont script itself and advices by the updmap.cfg file (in my case in C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\config) itself.
initexmf --edit-config-file updmapAnd added the line the following line to the file:
Map esa.mapThe program created with the previous command a new updmap.cfg file with the following contents:
%% T1 font configuration settings. See the MiKTeX manual for help.in the directory:
C:\Users\<nonAdminRightUser>\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9\miktex\configFor the dvips program to be able to use the map contents I needed to issue the following command:
initexmf --mkmapsThe above steps are sufficient to create a pdf with the new esa font. The initexmf --mkmaps command need to be issued from the directory in which the esa.map file is located.
The initexmf --mkmaps command does issue the mkfntmap command and left its log at:
C:\Users\<nonAdminRightUser>\AppData\Local\MiKTeX\2.9\miktex\log\mkfntmap.logSo it was possible to check if the map file was actually picked up by MiKTeX.
2017-07-20 20:34:12,764+0200 INFO mkfntmap - Parsing .\esa.map...
The often used font installation guide from Phillip Lehman was located at time of writing at:
C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\doc\guides\fontinstallationguide\fontinstallationguide.pdf or internet
http://ctan.triasinformatica.nl/info/Type1fonts/fontinstallationguide/fontinstallationguide.pdf
In this guide it is said the map file should be copied to "dvips/config/ in the local TeX tree".
But the mkfntmap program did not pick it up only after running initexmf --update-fndb. I tried the following dirs:
C:\Users\<nonAdminRightUser>\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9\fonts\map\dvips\esa\esa.map
Also here it was successfully picked up:
C:\localtexmf\fonts\map\dvips\esa\esa.map
which definitely is my preferred path, since this is my private path, that is not in danger :) by the MiKTeX installation system. I set this previously up in the MiKTeX settings (admin) application.
i shall note that I do have a multi-user Windows 10 system. While I am doing the font installation on my user, while I do not have administrator rights. I can however run e.g. the MiKTeX settings (admin) application under the administrator user which gives it elevated access to the rest of the system.
This map installation or usage was terrible, I had no idea who was working because of what and whom. It was an endless copying around and trying. There are so many paths and user/access combination, that this took really long to figure out whats going on. Especially in the beginning when the TransType program produced unusable font files.
The other files I copied according to the font installation guide chapter 1.4 "installing font and support files" to the appropriate directories.
These were:
tfm files to:
C:\localtexmf\fonts\tfm\esa
pfb files to:
C:\localtexmf\fonts\type1\esa
vf files to:
C:\localtexmf\fonts\vf\esa
fd files to:
C:\localtexmf\tex\latex\esa
Note: I created these folder myself (including C:\localtexmf). This I configured to be my local texmf root with the MiKTeX settings (admin) application.
I guess I needed to run initexmf --update-fndb again here. I did run this command so often that I lost track and patience to remove the files again to try if this command actually made it happen that the font files were found by the appropriate programs.
I created the final test pdf from the following source file "animate.ltx":
\documentclass[pstricks]{standalone}
\usepackage{pstricks-add}
\begin{document}
\multido{\rA=-1.0+0.1}{20}
{
\begin{pspicture}(-2.0,-0.5)(2.0,0.5)
\psline(-2.0,0)(2.0,0)
\rput[B](\rA,0){\fontfamily{esa}\fontseries{m}\fontshape{n}\selectfont Test sentence.}
\end{pspicture}
}
\end{document}
With the following commands:
>latex animate.ltx
>dvips animate.dvi
>ps2pdf animate.pdf
This created a pdf with 20 tiny pages. This pages I created with the convert program that was contained as a legacy tool in the imagemagic toolset. I did this only to be able to upload it here.
>convert -delay 10 -density 600 -alpha off animate.pdf animate.gif
