Re: [Groff] opentype and postscript fonts

[Pierre-Jean]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:


> I suggest to try heirloom troff which supports OpenType fonts
> natively.  Otherwise...

The case of heirloom troff is quite strange:
- It has some advantages: OpenType font support, and Knuth's
  algorythm for paragraph adjustment...
- It has most of the groff fonctionnality (utf8 support,
  long name macros...)
- It is frequently advised here.
- It's onliest - minor, in my opinion - default is the usage
  of pipes instead of command line arguments.
- But everybody seems to prefer groff... And me too since it
  is actively developped.

I've got a lot of question concerning this situation:
- Which are the defaults of heirloom troff?
- Why not integrating heirloom troff advantages inside
  groff?

> ... I see this in 
>
>   http://www.lcdf.org/type/t1reencode.1.html  :
>
>     This series of commands, which use cfftot1(1) and otftotfm(1) as
>     well as t1reencode itself, generate a version of Warnock Pro
>     Regular with old-style figures in the slots for numbers (because
>     of otftotfm’s -fonum option). The new font will be called
>     WarnockPro-RegularOsF.
>
>       otftotfm -fonum WarnockPro-Regular.otf \
>                --output-encoding /tmp/osf.enc
>       cfftot1 WarnockPro-Regular.otf | t1reencode -e /tmp/osf.enc \
>               -n WarnockPro-RegularOsF -N "Warnock Pro Regular OsF" \
>               -o WarnoProRegOsF.pfb
>
> It seems to me that this is exactly what you need.


Thanks for showing me that page, after some hours of tests with
otftotfm, I had finally thought this tool was only usefull
for latex, and didn't look at t1reencode man page.

But the solution explained here doesn't work for Groff. I've
tried to make a font with small caps, using the "-fsmcp"
option. With fontforge, I've looked at the pfd file:
- It has got small caps and normal letters.
- The small caps are named "a.smcp" where the normals
  letters are named "a".
- The small-caps unicode code is "U+????", where the normal
  letter have their real unicode name, for example "U+0061"
  for "a".
- The onliest difference with a regular pfb file is that the
  small caps are placed where the normal letters are usually
  placed, ie in "97 0x61" for a.smcp.

But, this onliest change is not efficient. Based on that pfa
file, I've made an afm file with "t1rawafm", made a roff
font with afmtodit, and tried it. Normal letters are used
but not small caps...

So, as far as I understand (but honestly, I don't understand
anything here) it seems that latex look at the place of the
glyph in the font, where groff look at his name or at his
code: the solution explained here is probably usefull for
latex, but not for groff...


Am I missing something? Should I ask help to the maintainer
of lcdf-typetools?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Pierre-Jean