TTF2PT1(1) TTF2PT1 Font Converter TTF2PT1(1)NAME
TTF2PT1 - A True Type to PostScript Type 1 Font Converter
SYNOPSISttf2pt1 [-options] ttffont.ttf [Fontname]
or
ttf2pt1 [-options] ttffont.ttf -
DESCRIPTION
Ttf2pt1 is a font converter from the True Type format (and some other
formats supported by the FreeType library as well) to the Adobe Type1
format.
The versions 3.0 and later got rather extensive post-processing
algorithm that brings the converted fonts to the requirements of the
Type1 standard, tries to correct the rounding errors introduced during
conversions and some simple kinds of bugs that are typical for the
public domain TTF fonts. It also generates the hints that enable much
better rendering of fonts in small sizes that are typical for the
computer displays. But everything has its price, and some of the
optimizations may not work well for certain fonts. That's why the
options were added to the converter, to control the performed
optimizations.
OPTIONS
The first variant creates the file Fontname.pfa (or Fontname.pfb if the
option '-b' was used) with the converted font and Fontname.afm with the
font metrics, the second one prints the font or another file (if the
option '-G' was used) on the standard output from where it can be
immediately piped through some filter. If no Fontname is specified for
the first variant, the name is generated from ttffont by replacing the
.ttf filename suffix.
Most of the time no options are neccessary (with a possible exception
of '-e'). But if there are some troubles with the resulting font, they
may be used to control the conversion. The options are:
· -a - Include all the glyphs from the source file into the converted
file. If this option is not specified then only the glyphs that have
been assigned some encoding are included, because the rest of glyphs
would be inaccessible anyway and would only consume the disk space.
But some applications are clever enough to change the encoding on the
fly and thus use the other glyphs, in this case they could benefit
from using this option. But there is a catch: the X11 library has
rather low limit for the font size. Including more glyphs increases
the file size and thus increases the chance of hitting this limit.
See app/X11/README for the description of a patch to X11 which fixes
this problem.
· -b - Encode the resulting font to produce a ready .pfb file.
· -d suboptions - Debugging options. The suboptions are:
a - Print out the absolute coordinates of dots in outlines. Such a
font can not be used by any program (that's why this option is
incompatible with '-e') but it has proven to be a valuable debuging
information.
r - Do not reverse the direction of outlines. The TTF fonts have the
standard direction of outlines opposite to the Type1 fonts. So they
should be reversed during proper conversion. This option may be used
for debugging or to handle a TTF font with wrong direction of
outlines (possibly, converted in a broken way from a Type1 font). The
first signs of the wrong direction are the letters like "P" or "B"
without the unpainted "holes" inside.
· -e - Assemble the resulting font to produce a ready .pfa file.
[ S.B.: Personally I don't think that this option is particularly
useful. The same result may be achieved by piping the unassembled
data through t1asm, the Type 1 assembler. And, anyways, it's good to
have the t1utils package handy. But Mark and many users think that
this functionality is good and it took not much time to add this
option. ]
· -F - Force the Unicode encoding: any type of MS encoding specified in
the font is ignored and the font is treated like it has Unicode
encoding. WARNING: this option is intended for buggy fonts which
actually are in Unicode but are marked as something else. The effect
on the other fonts is unpredictable.
· -G suboptions - File generation options. The suboptions may be
lowercase or uppercase, the lowercase ones disable the generation of
particular files, the corresponding uppercase suboptions enable the
generation of the same kind of files. If the result of ttf2pt1 is
requested to be printed on the standard output, the last enabling
suboption of -G determines which file will be written to the standard
output and the rest of files will be discarded. For example, -G A
will request the AFM file. The suboptions to disable/enable the
generation of the files are:
f/F - The font file. Depending on the other options this file will
have one of the suffixes .t1a, .pfa or .pfb. If the conversion result
is requested on the standard output ('-' is used as the output file
name) then the font file will also be written there by default, if
not overwritten by another suboption of -G. Default: enabled
a/A - The Adobe font metrics file (.afm). Default: enabled
e/E - The dvips encoding file (.enc). Default: disabled
· -l language[+argument] - Extract the fonts for the specified language
from a multi-language Unicode font. If this option is not used the
converter tries to guess the language by the values of the shell
variable LANG. If it is not able to guess the language by LANG it
tries all the languages in the order they are listed.
After the plus sign an optional argument for the language extractor
may be specified. The format of the argument is absolutely up to the
particular language converter. The primary purpose of the argument is
to support selection of planes for the multi-plane Eastern encodings
but it can also be used in any other way. The language extractor may
decide to add the plane name in some form to the name of the
resulting font. None of the currently supported languages make any
use of the argument yet.
As of now the following languages are supported:
latin1 - for all the languages using the Latin-1 encoding
latin2 - for the Central European languages
latin4 - for the Baltic languages
latin5 - for the Turkish language
cyrillic - for the languages with Cyrillic alphabet
russian - historic synonym for cyrillic
bulgarian - historic synonym for cyrillic
adobestd - for the AdobeStandard encoding used by TeX
plane+argument - to select one plane from a multi-byte encoding
The argument of the "plane" language may be in one of three forms:
plane+pid=<pid>,eid=<eid>
plane+pid=<pid>,eid=<eid>,<plane_number>
plane+<plane_number>
Pid (TTF platform id) and eid (TTF encoding id) select a particular
TTF encoding table in the original font. They are specified as
decimal numbers. If this particular encoding table is not present in
the font file then the conversion fails. The native ("ttf") front-end
parser supports only pid=3 (Windows platform), the FreeType-based
("ft") front-end supports any platform. If pid/eid is not specified
then the TTF encoding table is determined as usual: Unicode encoding
if it's first or an 8-bit encoding if not (and for an 8-bit encoding
the plane number is silently ignored). To prevent the converter from
falling back to an 8-bit encoding, specify the Unicode pid/eid value
explicitly.
Plane_number is a hexadecimal (if starts with "0x") or decimal
number. It gives the values of upper bytes for which 256 characters
will be selected. If not specified, defaults to 0. It is also used as
a font name suffix (the leading "0x" is not included into the
suffix).
NOTE: You may notice that the language names are not uniform: some
are the names of particular languages and some are names of
encodings. This is because of the different approaches. The original
idea was to implement a conversion from Unicode to the appropriate
Windows encoding for a given language. And then use the translation
tables to generate the fonts in whatever final encodings are needed.
This would allow to pile together the Unicode fonts and the non-
Unicode Windows fonts for that language and let the program to sort
them out automatically. And then generate fonts in all the possible
encodings for that language. An example of this approach is the
Russian language support. But if there is no multiplicity of
encodings used for some languages and if the non-Unicode fonts are
not considered important by the users, another way would be simpler
to implement: just provide only one table for extraction of the
target encoding from Unicode and don't bother with the translation
tables. The latin* "languages" are examples of this approach. If
somebody feels that he needs the Type1 fonts both in Latin-* and
Windows encodings he or she is absolutely welcome to submit the code
to implement it.
WARNING: Some of the glyphs included into the AdobeStandard encoding
are not included into the Unicode standard. The most typical examples
of such glyphs are ligatures like 'fi', 'fl' etc. Because of this the
font designers may place them at various places. The converter tries
to do its best, if the glyphs have honest Adobe names and/or are
placed at the same codes as in the Microsoft fonts they will be
picked up. Otherwise a possible solution is to use the option '-L'
with an external map.
· -L file[+[pid=<pid>,eid=<eid>,][plane]] - Extract the fonts for the
specified language from a multi-language font using the map from this
file. This is rather like the option '-l' but the encoding map is not
compiled into the program, it's taken from that file, so it's easy to
edit. Examples of such files are provided in maps/adobe-standard-
encoding.map, CP1250.map. (NOTE: the 'standard encoding' map does not
include all the glyphs of the AdobeStandard encoding, it's provided
only as an example.) The description of the supported map formats is
in the file maps/unicode-sample.map.
Likewise to '-l', an argument may be specified after the map file
name. But in this case the argument has fixed meaning: it selects the
original TTF encoding table (the syntax is the same as in '-l plane')
and/or a plane of the map file. The plane name also gets added after
dash to the font name. The plane is a concept used in the Eastern
fonts with big number of glyphs: one TTF font gets divided into
multiple Type1 fonts, each containing one plane of up to 256 glyphs.
But with a little creativity this concept may be used for other
purposes of combining multiple translation maps into one file. To
extract multiple planes from a TTF font ttf2pt1 must be run multiple
times, each time with a different plane name specified.
The default original TTF encoding table used for the option '-L' is
Unicode. The map files may include directives to specify different
original TTF encodings. However if the pid/eid pair is specified with
it overrides any original encoding specified in the map file.
· -m type=value - Set maximal or minimal limits of resources. These
limits control the the font generation by limiting the resources that
the font is permitted to require from the PostScript interpreter.
The currently supported types of limits are:
h - the maximal hint stack depth for the substituted hints. The
default value is 128, according to the limitation in X11. This seems
to be the lowest (and thus the safest) widespread value. To display
the hint stack depth required by each glyph in a .t1a file use the
script scripts/cntstems.pl.
· -O suboptions - Outline processing options. The suboptions may be
lowercase or uppercase, the lowercase ones disable the features, the
corresponding uppercase suboptions enable the same features. The
suboptions to disable/enable features are:
b/B - Guessing of the ForceBold parameter. This parameter helps the
Type1 engine to rasterize the bold fonts properly at small sizes.
But the algorithm used to guess the proper value of this flag makes
that guess based solely on the font name. In rare cases that may
cause errors, in these cases you may want to disable this guessing.
Default: enabled
h/H - Autogeneration of hints. The really complex outlines may
confuse the algorithm, so theoretically it may be useful sometimes to
disable them. Although up to now it seems that even bad hints are
better than no hints at all. Default: enabled
u/U - Hint substitution. Hint substitution is a technique permitting
generation of more detailed hints for the rasterizer. It allows to
use different sets of hints for different parts of a glyph and change
these sets as neccessary during rasterization (that's why
"substituted"). So it should improve the quality of the fonts
rendered at small sizes. But there are two catches: First, the X11
library has rather low limit for the font size. More detailed hints
increase the file size and thus increase the chance of hitting this
limit (that does not mean that you shall hit it but you may if your
fonts are particularly big). This is especially probable for Unicode
fonts converted with option '-a', so you may want to use '-a'
together with '-Ou'. See app/X11/README for the description of a
patch to X11 which fixes this problem. Second, some rasterizers
(again, X11 is the typical example) have a limitation for total
number of hints used when drawing a glyph (also known as the hint
stack depth). If that stack overflows the glyph is ignored. Starting
from version 3.22 ttf2pt1 uses algorithms to minimizing this depth,
with the trade-off of slightly bigger font files. The glyphs which
still exceed the limit set by option '-mh' have all the substituted
hints removed and only base hints left. The algorithms seem to have
been refined far enough to make the fonts with substituted hints look
better than the fonts without them or at least the same. Still if the
original fonts are not well-designed the detailed hinting may
emphasize the defects of the design, such as non-even thickness of
lines. So provided that you are not afraid of the X11 bug the best
idea would be to generate a font with this feature and without it,
then compare the results using the program other/cmpf (see the
description in other/README) and decide which one looks better.
Default: enabled
o/O - Space optimization of the outlines' code. This kind of
optimization never hurts, and the only reason to disable this feature
is for comparison of the generated fonts with the fonts generated by
the previous versions of converter. Well, it _almost_ never hurts. As
it turned out there exist some brain-damaged printers which don't
understand it. Actually this feature does not change the outlines at
all. The Type 1 font manual provides a set of redundant operators
that make font description shorter, such as '10 hlineto' instead of
'0 10 rlineto' to describe a horizontal line. This feature enables
use of these operators. Default: enabled
s/S - Smoothing of outlines. If the font is broken in some way (even
the ones that are not easily noticeable), such smoothing may break it
further. So disabling this feature is the first thing to be tried if
some font looks odd. But with smoothing off the hint generation
algorithms may not work properly too. Default: enabled
t/T - Auto-scaling to the 1000x1000 Type1 standard matrix. The TTF
fonts are described in terms of an arbitrary matrix up to 4000x4000.
The converted fonts must be scaled to conform to the Type1 standard.
But the scaling introduces additional rounding errors, so it may be
curious sometimes to look at the font in its original scale.
Default: enabled
v/V - Do vectorization on the bitmap fonts. Functionally
"vectorization" is the same thing as "autotracing", a different word
is used purely to differentiate it from the Autotrace library. It
tries to produce nice smooth outlines from bitmaps. This feature is
still a work in progress though the results are already mostly
decent. Default: disabled
w/W - Glyphs' width corection. This option is designed to be used on
broken fonts which specify too narrow widths for the letters. You can
tell that a font can benefit from this option if you see that the
characters are smashed together without any whitespace between them.
This option causes the converter to set the character widths to the
actual width of this character plus the width of a typical vertical
stem. But on the other hand the well-designed fonts may have
characters that look better if their widths are set slightly
narrower. Such well-designed fonts will benefit from disabling this
feature. You may want to convert a font with and without this
feature, compare the results and select the better one. This feature
may be used only on proportional fonts, it has no effect on the
fixed-width fonts. Default: disabled
z/Z - Use the Autotrace library on the bitmap fonts. The results are
horrible and the use of this option is not recommended. This option
is present for experimental purposes. It may change or be removed in
the future. The working tracing can be achieved with option -OV.
Default: disabled
· -p parser_name - Use the specified front-end parser to read the font
file. If this option is not used, ttf2pt1 selects the parser
automatically based on the suffix of the font file name, it uses the
first parser in its list that supports this font type. Now two
parsers are supported:
ttf - built-in parser for the ttf files (suffix .ttf)
bdf - built-in parser for the BDF files (suffix .bdf)
ft - parser based on the FreeType-2 library (suffixes .ttf, .otf,
.pfa, .pfb)
The parser ft is NOT linked in by default. See Makefile for
instructions how to enable it. We do no support this parser on
Windows: probably it will work but nobody tried and nobody knows how
to build it.
The conversion of the bitmap fonts (such as BDF) is simplistic yet,
producing jagged outlines. When converting such fonts, it might be a
good idea to turn off the hint substitution (using option -Ou)
because the hints produced will be huge but not adding much to the
quality of the fonts.
· -u number - Mark the font with this value as its UniqueID. The
UniqueID is used by the printers with the hard disks to cache the
rasterized characters and thus significantly speed-up the printing.
Some of those printers just can't store the fonts without UniqueID on
their disk.The problem is that the ID is supposed to be unique, as it
name says. And there is no easy way to create a guaranteed unique ID.
Adobe specifies the range 4000000-4999999 for private IDs but still
it's difficult to guarantee the uniqueness within it. So if you don't
really need the UniqueID don't use it, it's optional. Luckily there
are a few millions of possible IDs, so the chances of collision are
rather low. If instead of the number a special value 'A' is given
then the converter generates the value of UniqueID automatically, as
a hash of the font name. (NOTE: in the version 3.22 the algorithm
for autogeneration of UniqueID was changed to fit the values into the
Adobe-spacified range. This means that if UniqueIDs were used then
the printer's cache may need to be flushed before replacing the fonts
converted by an old version with fonts converted by a newer version).
A simple way to find if any of the fonts in a given directory have
duplicated UniqueIDs is to use the command:
cat *.pf[ab] ⎪ grep UniqueID ⎪ sort ⎪ uniq -c ⎪ grep -v ' 1 '
Or if you use scripts/convert it will do that for you automatically
plus it will also give the exact list of files with duplicate UIDs.
· -v size - Re-scale the font to get the size of a typical uppercase
letter somewhere around the specified size. Actually, it re-scales
the whole font to get the size of one language-dependent letter to be
at least of the specified size. Now this letter is "A" in all the
supported languages. The size is specified in the points of the Type
1 coordinate grids, the maximal value is 1000. This is an
experimental option and should be used with caution. It tries to
increase the visible font size for a given point size and thus make
the font more readable. But if overused it may cause the fonts to
look out of scale. As of now the interesting values of size for this
option seem to be located mostly between 600 and 850. This re-scaling
may be quite useful but needs more experience to understand the
balance of its effects.
· -W level - Select the verbosity level of the warnings. Currently the
levels from 0 to 4 are supported. Level 0 means no warnings at all,
level 4 means all the possible warnings. The default level is 3.
Other levels may be added in the future, so using the level number 99
is recommended to get all the possible warnings. Going below level 2
is not generally recommended because you may miss valuable
information about the problems with the fonts being converted.
· Obsolete option: -A - Print the font metrics (.afm file) instead of
the font on STDOUT. Use -GA instead.
· Very obsolete option:
The algorithm that implemented the forced fixed width had major
flaws, so it was disabled. The code is still in the program and some
day it will be refined and returned back. Meanwhile the option name
'-f' was reused for another option. The old version was:
-f - Don't try to force the fixed width of font. Normally the
converter considers the fonts in which the glyph width deviates by
not more than 5% as buggy fixed width fonts and forces them to have
really fixed width. If this is undesirable, it can be disabled by
this option.
The .pfa font format supposes that the description of the characters is
binary encoded and encrypted. This converter does not encode or encrypt
the data by default, you have to specify the option '-e' or use the
t1asm program to assemble (that means, encode and encrypt) the font
program. The t1asm program that is included with the converter is
actually a part of the t1utils package, rather old version of which may
be obtained from
http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/t1utils.tar.gz
Note that t1asm from the old version of that package won't work
properly with the files generated by ttf2pt1 version 3.20 and later.
Please use t1asm packaged with ttf2pt1 or from the new version t1utils
instead. For a newer version of t1utils please look at
http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/
EXAMPLES
So, the following command lines:
ttf2pt1-e ttffont.ttf t1font
ttf2pt1 ttffont.ttf - ⎪ t1asm >t1font.pfa
represent two ways to get a working font. The benefit of the second
form is that other filters may be applied to the font between the
converter and assembler.
FILES
· TTF2PT1_LIBXDIR/t1asm
· TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/*
· TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/scripts/*
· TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/other/*
· TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/README
· TTF2PT1_SHAREDIR/FONTS
SEE ALSO
· the ttf2pt1_convert(1) manpage
· the ttf2pt1_x2gs(1) manpage
· the t1asm(1) manpage
· ttf2pt1-announce@lists.sourceforge.net
The mailing list with announcements about ttf2pt1. It is a
moderated mailing with extremely low traffic. Everyone is
encouraged to subscribe to keep in touch with the current status of
project. To subscribe use the Web interface at
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-announce. If
you have only e-mail access to the Net then send a subscribe
request to the development mailing list
ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and somebody will help you with
subscription.
· ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
ttf2pt1-users@lists.sourceforge.net
The ttf2pt1 mailing lists for development and users issues. They
have not that much traffic either. To subscribe use the Web
interface at
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-devel and
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-users. If
you have only e-mail access to the Net then send a subscribe
request to the development mailing list
ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and somebody will help you with
subscription.
· http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net
The main page of the project.
http://www.netspace.net.au/~mheath/ttf2pt1/
The old main page of the project.
BUGS
It seems that many Eastern fonts use features of the TTF format that
are not supported by the ttf2pt1's built-in front-end parser. Because
of this for now we recommend using the FreeType-based parser (option
'-p ft') with the "plane" language.
Troubleshooting and bug reports
Have problems with conversion of some font ? The converter dumps core ?
Or your printer refuses to understand the converted fonts ? Or some
characters are missing ? Or some characters look strange ?
Send the bug reports to the ttf2pt1 development mailing list at
ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.
Try to collect more information about the problem and include it into
the bug report. (Of course, even better if you would provide a ready
fix, but just a detailed bug report is also good). Provide detailed
information about your problem, this will speed up the response
greatly. Don't just write "this font looks strange after conversion"
but describe what's exactly wrong with it: for example, what characters
look wrong and what exactly is wrong about their look. Providing a link
to the original font file would be also a good idea. Try to do a little
troublehooting and report its result. This not only would help with the
fix but may also give you a temporary work-around for the bug.
First, enable full warnings with option '-W99', save them to a file and
read carefully. Sometimes the prolem is with a not implemented feature
which is reported in the warnings. Still, reporting about such problems
may be a good idea: some features were missed to cut corners, in hope
that no real font is using them. So a report about a font using such a
feature may motivate someone to implement it. Of course, you may be the
most motivated person: after all, you are the one wishing to convert
that font. ;-) Seriously, the philosophy "scrath your own itch" seems
to be the strongest moving force behind the Open Source software.
The next step is playing with the options. This serves a dual purpose:
on one hand, it helps to localize the bug, on the other hand you may be
able to get a working version of the font for the meantime while the
bug is being fixed. The typical options to try out are: first '-Ou', if
it does not help then '-Os', then '-Oh', then '-Oo'. They are
described in a bit more detail above. Try them one by one and in
combinations. See if with them the resulting fonts look better.
On some fonts ttf2pt1 just crashes. Commonly that happens because the
font being converted is highly defective (although sometimes the bug is
in ttf2pt1 itself). In any case it should not crash, so the reports
about such cases will help to handle these defects properly in future.
We try to respond to the bug reports in a timely fashion but alas, this
may not always be possible, especially if the problem is complex. This
is a volunteer project and its resources are limited. Because of this
we would appreciate bug reports as detailed as possible, and we would
appreciate the ready fixes and contributions even more.
HISTORY
Based on ttf2pfa by Andrew Weeks, and help from Frank Siegert.
Modification by Mark Heath.
Further modification by Sergey Babkin.
The Type1 assembler by I. Lee Hetherington with modifications by Kai-
Uwe Herbing.
3rd Berkeley Distribution version 3.4.4 TTF2PT1(1)
