Re: potentially stupid questions from a new user

[David Somers]

> For what kind of fonts?  For Type 1, you are right on the money with
> t1disasm.  For True Type fonts, I don't know of a tool that will give
> you outline information in a format like t1disasm.  There is, however,
> a True Type to XML tool called TTX.  It is from Just van Rossum, who
> is on this list.

XML is getting everywhere these days ;-)

> I have an incomplete CFF disassembler, but it is from another
> person. I'd have to ask him if it is all right to redistribute his
> code.  Bsides, I have to fix some stuff with respect to dunping
> correct hintmask/cntrmask data.

That could be useful. maybe I'm misreading things, but some of the OTFs that
I'm playing with don't seems to follow the specs too well... some of the
glyph names seem weird to me, but perhaps I should go see an optholomist ;-)

> For CFF fonts there is also the possibility of using ftview with
>
>     -d -l 4
>
> which will dump outline data to stdout (or is it stderr?).  You could
> then parse the resulting log...

Great; I just tried it. BTW, output appears to go to stdout.

I was also thinking that with the outline data I could then write a small
app to generate proof sheets (similar to OTFproof that comes in the OT FDK,
but with a few extra bells and whistles).

> > Also, has anybody thought about (or actually done) taking the glyph
> > outline data, and using it to generate a Type 1 PFB/AFM set? Just
> > asking, as this could be a neat way of converting TT and OTF fonts
> > to T1.
>
> Thought about it, yes.  Worked on it, no.  You could always install
> the OpenType/CFF font on a Windows box (using ATM 4.1), and print to a
> PS file.  The AdobePS driver will autoconvert the CFF data to Type 1
> data (without subroutine data).  I am not sure if it will do the
> correct thing with hint replacement.

The slight SNAFU is that I'm working on an embedded system, so can't rely on
ATM/AdobePS to do the conversion. Plus ATM 4.1 still has a few
bugs/features/whatever in it, so I'm loath to install it on my system.

BTW, in theory (according to the Adobe), it should be possible to convert
completely between CFF and Type1 (and vice versa)... needless to day, the
tools for doing this aren't available outside of Adobe.

Regards from Luxembourg,

David.