Re: A Hello and a Question about Fonts

[Michael Piotrowski]

On 2008-07-24, "Michael Kerpan" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello there. I'm a lout newbie and I have a question about Fonts. I've
> seen at least one thread here that indicates that lout can use OTF
> fonts (albeit with some jiggering needed to make ligatures work) but
> NONE of the official documentation seems to mention this being
> possible and I can't find anything in the Chagelog that would indicate
> that OTF is supported.

Lout doesn't deal with fonts, only with metrics, thus, as far as Lout is
concerned, you can use any font technology you want--Lout only needs an
AFM file.  You can generate AFM files from OpenType and TrueType fonts,
however Lout cannot make use of the advanced features of OpenType fonts.

How the resulting PostScript file is rendered is a different matter.

> Also, has the font embedding situation improved at all since
> http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/UseCustomFonts was written back in
> 1999? Given the the easiest way to embed fonts in a PDF through
> GhostScript is to make sure they're embedded in the PS file you send
> to Ghostscript, a solution that doesn't involve dodgy Perl scripts
> would be nice...

The fonts need not be embedded if the PostScript interpreter has access
to them.  Thus, if you're producing PDF through Ghostscript, you only
need to make sure that Ghostscript finds the fonts, e.g., via
GS_FONTPATH if the fonts in question are stored in a location not in its
default search path (see the output of "gs -h" and the Ghostscript
documentation for details.)

HTH

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                               <address@hidden>
Public key at <http://www.dynalabs.de/mxp/pubkey.txt> (ID 0x1614A044)