Re: [groff] Wierd font troubles

[John Gardner]

>
> *Is there any way to use a .t1 file in groff?*


You might find this article
<https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/fonts/type1-fonts-groff.html>
helpful. It was written a while ago, but I doubt anything's changed with
Groff's font-handling that renders the page obsolete.

*Convert it to .pfa, for instance?*


A T1 file *is* a PFA file. Or a PFB, depending on whether the currentfile
eexec block contains ASCII or binary data. As I said, there's no standard
file extension for T1 fonts, and T1 itself doesn't say anything about how
its encrypted portion (the lines after currentfile eexec…) is stored. If
you open a T1, PFA or PFB file, you'll notice their headers are all
PostScript source.

On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 10:29, Dale Snell <address@hidden> wrote:

>
>
> *P.S.  What's a .t1 file?*
>
>
> > T1 = Type 1 font file
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1>. It's a
> PostScript program with an encrypted subset of drawing commands
> > which produce letterforms. Note that there's no standard file extension
> for Type 1 fonts; pfa and
> > pfb are typically more common (PFA and PFB are more-or-less the same,
> except the latter uses
> > raw binary whilst the former uses ASCII. PFA = "Printer Font ASCII", PFB
> = "Printer Font Binary").
>
> Thank you for the explanation.  I wondered if it might not be something
> like that, but as I said, the only description I could find was for the MRI
> files.  Is there any way to use a .t1 file in groff?  Convert it to .pfa,
> for instance?  (I would not be surprised if the answer is no, but I thought
> I should ask.)
>
> *When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't build the groff fonts, and I
> don't know why.*
>
>
> > I've not looked too thoroughly into Groff's makefiles, but you shouldn't
> need to run make to generate
> > font descriptions from AFM files. Are you using the afmtodit binary
> (that should be) available in your
> > $PATH?
>
> Make automatically runs BuildFoundries when Groff is built, it's in the
> "build the URW++ Basic35 fonts" part of building Groff.  I didn't have to
> do anything special.  And yes, afmtodit is in my $PATH.
>
>
> *Then I created symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names and**ran
> configure. Success!  Huzzah!*
>
>
> > Needless to say, you shouldn't have to be doing that. This is something
> that should really be fixed
> > on Groff's end...
>
> I'll certainly agree with that.  My thought is that Groff should simply
> include the URW++ fonts by default.  Given that both Fedora and Debian have
> deprecated Type1 support, it probably won't be too much longer before those
> fonts won't be available from the distros' repositories at all.
> Show quoted text
> --Dale
>
> --
> "And finally, _thinking_ is an exercise to which all too few brains are
> accustomed."  --E.E. "Doc" Smith, _First Lensman_
>
> On Sun, Mar 24, 2019, 2:38 PM John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>>
>>>
>>> *P.S.  What's a .t1 file?  My google-fu failed me; all I could find was
>>> areference to "male MRI" files.  Funny, I didn't know that MRI files
>>> hadgender.  At least, nobody said anything about it when my MRIs were
>>> taken.*
>>
>>
>> T1 = Type 1 font file
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1>. It's a
>> PostScript program with an encrypted subset of drawing commands which
>> produce letterforms. Note that there's no standard file extension for Type
>> 1 fonts; pfa and pfb are typically more common (PFA and PFB are
>> more-or-less the same, except the latter uses raw binary whilst the former
>> uses ASCII. PFA = "Printer Font ASCII", PFB = "Printer Font Binary").
>>
>> *When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't build the groff fonts, and I
>>> don't know why.*
>>
>>
>> I've not looked too thoroughly into Groff's makefiles, but you shouldn't
>> need to run make to generate font descriptions from AFM files. Are you
>> using the afmtodit binary (that should be) available in your $PATH?
>>
>>
>>> *Then I created symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names
>>> and**ran configure. Success!  Huzzah!*
>>
>>
>> Needless to say, you shouldn't have to be doing that. This is something
>> that should really be fixed on Groff's end...
>>
>> On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 07:24, Dale Snell <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> I just updated my computer to Fedora 29, and downloaded the latest
>>> version
>>> of groff (1.22.4).  When I ran configure, it couldn't find the URW++
>>> fonts.  Turned out I hadn't installed them.  D'oh!  Installed them, but
>>> configure still couldn't find them.  I added the --with-urw-fonts-dir
>>> option, but configure _still_ couldn't find them.  It took me some
>>> digging
>>> (and pulling out what little hair I have left), but I found a couple of
>>> problems:
>>>
>>>     1)  URW++ has changed their file names to something human-readable,
>>> instead of the nigh-password-worthy names they used to use.
>>>
>>>     2)  URW++ no longer ships *.pfb files in their base35 fonts package.
>>> Insead, they ship *.otf, *.afm, and *.t1 files.
>>>
>>> configure looks in the urw-base35 fonts directory
>>> ("/usr/share/fonts/urw-base35" in Fedora) for "a010013l.pfb", which is
>>> now
>>> "URWGothic-Book.pfb", to determine if the URW++ fonts are there.
>>> Naturally, since the file didn't exist, it decided that there weren't any
>>> fonts to install.  Thinking I could work around the problem, I used
>>> FontForge to create .pfb files out of the .otf files.  Then I created
>>> symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names and ran configure.
>>> Success!  Huzzah!
>>>
>>> Alas, it was too soon to cheer.  When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't
>>> build the groff fonts, and I don't know why.  The error message is:
>>>
>>>     "BuildFoundries: warning: line 77: Failed to create groff font 'U-AB'
>>> by running afmtodit"
>>>
>>> where the line number increments by one for each groff font it can't
>>> build.
>>>
>>> At this point I'm lost.  I am not a Perl programmer, so I don't know what
>>> BuildFoundries is actually doing.  There is probably something very
>>> simple
>>> going worng, but I don't know where to look.
>>>
>>> Anyway, I gave up on groff installing the fonts automatically and used
>>> Peter Schaffter's "install-fonts.sh" script.  Worked like a charm (thanks
>>> Peter!).  So I installed several other typeface families (Linux Libertine
>>> and TeX Gyre, among others).  All was well, or so I thought.
>>>
>>> I did some work on a project file and ran it through groff (via pdfmom)
>>> to
>>> build a PDF.  It seemed to have worked until I looked more closely.  Much
>>> to my surprise, the ASCII single-quote character "'" which is supposed to
>>> be rendered as a typographic single-quote, was still coming out as a
>>> typewriter single-quote.  I tried changing font families and found
>>> something very odd.  The fonts that groff installed work as expected.
>>> The
>>> ones I installed have the problem.  I have no idea why.  I can work
>>> around
>>> the problem by adding a ".tr '\[cq]" line to the source file.  Still, I'd
>>> like to know where things went wrong so that I can fix it.  Does anyone
>>> have any suggestions?  Right now I have no idea where to start looking.
>>>
>>> --Dale
>>>
>>> P.S.  What's a .t1 file?  My google-fu failed me; all I could find was a
>>> reference to "male MRI" files.  Funny, I didn't know that MRI files had
>>> gender.  At least, nobody said anything about it when my MRIs were taken.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> "And finally, _thinking_ is an exercise to which all too few brains are
>>> accustomed."  --E.E. "Doc" Smith, _First Lensman_
>>>
>>