Re: [ft-devel] Truetype Collection fonts

[George Williams]

On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 16:40, Deron Kazmaier wrote:
> I need to extract PDF/PS embeddable fonts from a ttc 
I find this a little confusing -- generally the software that produces
the pdf should be capable of doing the conversion.

However, if you really mean a font that can be dumped into a PDF the
thing that would make most sense would be a type42 PostScript font --
that is basically a PostScript wrapper around the basic truetype tables.
It's not a very useful item because you will lose kerning info, ligature
info, etc. -- PDF files don't need those data as the application that
creates the PDF does all that stuff to the glyph stream stored in the
file and just leaves the font containing the data to draw a glyph.

Or does your PDF generator not like TTC files and you just want a ttf?

Or do you want a type1 font? (this is another thing that can be dumped
directly into a PDF, but here the kerning data gets stored in a separate
file).

> (plus Mac font suitcase, but that is a bit different beast).
Extracting all the ttfs in the ttc and putting them in a single mac
suitcase? Or just one by one? 

TTC files allow various optimizations to be done that can reduce file
size greatly. You will lose that in another format.
>   Anyone with a  suggestion 
> on where to start? Would I be well served to use some FreeType internals 
> or roll something independent?
FontForge ( http://fontforge.sf.net/ ) can do all these conversions.
FontLab also (but it costs real money). Doubtless there are others.

  FreeType is designed to read and rasterize fonts. It doesn't have
conversion in mind, and while conversion could be done with FreeType it
would be a lot of coding on your part.