OpenType .otf fonts and printing

[Michael A. Peters]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 04:23 -0400, James Cloos wrote:

> 
> An interm solution is to follow what is being done for TeX.  The lcdf
> type tools (available at http://www.lcdf.org/type/)

lcdf-typetools is now in Fedora Extras and in fact is what I have been
using to use otf fonts in LaTeX quite succesfully. I have used it to
make Type1 fonts for system use - though I ran into some oddities with
some fonts - such as Helvetica having some numbers (1 and 2) superscript
when they shouldn't be.

Same thing with the superscript happens with fontforge -c 'open($1);
generate($2)'  HelveticaLTStd-Roman.otf HelveticaLTStd-Roman.pfb

However, using fontforge to generate a .ttf works just fine.

I suspect that (at least with Helvetica) I need to tell it more about
which glyphs it is suppose to use. I'm guessing the font has a
superscript 1 and 2 and when making the more limited glyph set .pfb - it
guesses wrong about which 1 and 2 it should use.

Interestingly, the Helvetica LT Std font generated for LaTeX using
otftotfm works just fine, it's just generated .pfb's for outside latex
that have the issue.

> Note though that converting to t1 format looses all of the opentype
> features.  All of the glyphs are still there but you may not be able
> to access them.  So this is only an *interm* solution.

The support is actually better than I thought.
When Mozilla couldn't print them I thought support just wasn't there at
all - but it seems now that was just the print font cache wasn't updated
so it used the fallback.