Re: [Groff] Musings on the adding of fonts

[P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 10:37 a.m. 27/02/2002 +0100, Sigfrid Lundberg, NetLab wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia wrote:
>
> > At 06:51 p.m. 26/02/2002 +0100, Sigfrid Lundberg, NetLab wrote:
> >
> >
>
> I actually tried both those tools, in addition to pfaedit, on at least
> three fonts, including a (I think) commercial version of garamond we got
> on the CD with our HP 1200 laser printer. None of them yielded a kerning
> table, only type widths.  To reformulate my query:
>
>     Is the kerning info embedded in a ttf so sofisticated that it
>     cannot be exported into an .afm file?

It could be if the kerning was included in a type 2 multiple state table. 
As far as I know, only QuickDraw GX fonts (presently know as AAT fonts) and 
OpenType fonts use this kind of table. But this should not be a problem to 
anything using freetype 2.x in the back end.

> Or
>
>     Is it more likely the fonts that I tried are of inferior quality,
>     and thus lacking kerning info?

No. It is the fonts supplied by your vendor. I have never seen a truetype 
font released by Hewlett-Packard that had kerning, nor the previous 
versions first by Miles, Inc. nor later by Elsewhere (each bought the 
previous in due time).

They consider them as "glorified screen fonts" for the PCL fonts in the 
printer's ROM. Yet, the font metrics specification for the actual ROM fonts 
have kerning. Once upon a time I had access to a copy of the HP-LJ4 
specifications manual for the LJ4 and I saw the kerning tables with my own 
eyes (should have made a copy). Unfortunately, this information is lost. I 
tried to get a copy of the book and or the digital files from them about 4 
years ago and they told me that the product was "discontinued". Perhaps you 
can do something with the metrics files available at CTAN/fonts/ljmetrics.



--
Alejandro López-Valencia
http://dradul.tripod.com/
[...] every cultured man is a theologician, and to be so
faith isn't needed. (J.L. Borges)