Generate Font Dialog
This generates
font files, both outline and bitmap. You may choose not to generate either,
you may generate an afm file or a pfm file, you may select the type of postscript
output, you may select which pixelsizes of bitmap to generate.
The outline types are:
-
PostScript Type1 font, binary format (a .pfb file, this may be used by adobe
type manager or by the new x font server)
-
PostScript Type1 font, ascii format (a .pfa file, this is used by printers)
-
PostScript Type1 font, macbinary format (a postscript font wrapped up in
a set of mac resources wrapped up in a macbinary file, to be copied to a
mac, unmacbinaried, and installed there)
If you are on a mac then a resource fork will be generated directly, macbinary
will not be used.
-
Multiple PostScript Type 1 binary fonts (this is used to convert a large
font with a two byte encoding into a series of smaller pfb files with 256
characters in each. You may be prompted for a file to specify the conversion.
See the ttf2tfm man page for a description of these SUBFONT DEFINITION FILES.
Here is an example of what the file should look like)
-
PostScript Type3 font (a .ps font, this is also used by printers and is not
encrypted)
-
PostScript Type0 font, this is only available if you have a font encoded
with Unicode or one of the CJK encodings. Type0 fonts can have up to 65536
characters in them (as opposed to 256 for Type1s and Type3s).
-
PostScript CID font, this is only available if your font is a
CID font. This produces a font in the old Type1
CID format. You probably want to use the OpenType CID format...
-
True Type. The instructions (hinting) are probably not very good. No diagonal
stems are hinted. Instructing is based on the hints used for postscript,
with some additional work done for serifs, and some recognition that all
characters of approximately the same height should have the same height at
small pointsizes (equivalent to PostScript's BlueValues).
-
True Type Symbol. Same as True Type, except it uses the 1 byte encoding given
in the font. This is important on windows as symbol and dingbat encodings
often include characters (in the range 0x80-0x9f) which aren't mapped in
normal encodings. It is important on the Mac because I do not generate the
correct encoding tables for any script other than MacRoman, so if you want
a MacCyrillic font use this mode.
-
True Type macbinary format, a truetype font wrapped up in a mac resource,
wrapped up in a macbinary file. Designed to be used for a mac.
If you are on a mac, then a file with a resource fork will be generated directly
(macbinary will not be used).
-
True Type dfont format, a truetype font wrapped up in a mac dfont (data fork
resource file). Mac OS/X font.
-
Open Type. Officially Open Type includes True Type, but Open Type True Type
fonts are no different from plain True Type fonts, so they might as well
just be called True Type. So by Open Type I mean Open Type with a CFF Postscript
Type 2 font inside it.
-
Open Type dfont format, an open type font wrapped up in a mac dfont (data
fork resource file). Mac OS/X font.
-
Open Type CID, This is only available if your font is a
CID font. It procudes an OpenType CID-keyed font.
-
None
The bitmap types are:
-
BDF -- The internal bitmap fonts will be saved in bdf format. You may only
select sizes for which you have already generated fonts (you may output
anti-aliased (greymap) fonts as well as bitmaps. A 12pixel high greymap font
with 8 bits/pixel can be represented as 12@8).
-
In TTF -- Store the bitmap fonts inside the ttf file using the microsoft
tables.
-
In TTF (Apple) -- Store the bitmap fonts inside the ttf file using the apple
tables (I wish they were consistent!)
-
In sfnt (dfont) -- Only available if no outline font is generated. Apple
allows bitmaps to be stored within a truetype file (sfnt) even if there is
no outline font. So this generates a ttf file that just contains bitmaps
and wraps it up in a dfont.
-
NFNT (MacBin) -- Converts the bitmap fonts into Macintosh NFNT resources
and wraps them up in a mac binary file.
NFNT (Resource) -- On a mac the NFNT font will be generated in a resource
fork directly.
-
NFNT (dfont) -- Converts the bitmap fonts into Macintosh NFNT resources and
stores them in a mac (OS/X) dfont file.
-
Windows FNT -- this needs to be processed somehow with the windows resource compiler
to create a FON file. I don't have enough info to do this myself yet.
-
None
There are also the following check boxes. Not all are visible at all times.
-
[] AFM -- Generate an adobe font metrics file
-
[] PFM -- Generate a windows printer font metrics file
-
[] Hints -- Include truetype hints in a truetype font (pfaedit's hints are
currently bad, I suggest you leave this off for now)
-
[] PSNames -- Include the full 'post' (postscript name) table in the font
-
[] Apple -- Apple and MS/Adobe disagree on the format of a ttf font. This
is annoying. Checking this box means the font will be generated according
to Apple's desires, leaving it unchecked means according to MS/Adobe's desires.
Currently this controls:
-
The bitmap tables (Apple calls it 'bdat', MS/Adobe 'EBDT'. The data in them
are the same)
-
The PostScript name in the 'name' table (Apple says there must be either
0 or 1 of them, MS/Adobe say any value other than 1)
-
Apple and MS/Adobe also differ on the way references (components) are scaled.
Luckily there is another way to disambiguate this case (and references
are rarely scaled anyway).
-
The GPOS, GSUB and kern tables.
Apple does not support GPOS/GSUB tables. MicroSoft still supports kern
tables for some fonts but requires GPOS for others.
TTF (and Open Type) fonts are usually generated in Unicode encoding, there
will also be a tiny macintosh encoding of whatever bits of MacRoman fit in
the first 256 glyphs (and a macintosh copy of the unicode encoding) -- the
exceptions are: symbol fonts will use the symbol encoding, KSC5601 and Wansung
fonts will use Wansung, Johab fonts will use johab, JIS208 and SJIS fonts
will use SJIS, Big5 will use big5 encoding. Fonts with a "Full Unicode" encoding
will have both a 2 byte unicode encoding table and a 4 byte table. OpenType
CID keyed fonts will be saved with Unicode encoding.
Postscript fonts are generated in whatever encoding the font is using (except
if you take a two byte encoding and generate a Type1 font (rather than a
Type0) then only the first few characters will be encoded). Type0 does not
support a full Unicode (4 byte) encoding.
PS CID (and OpenType CID in the CFF) are saved with no encoding. The encodings
live in seperate cmap files which are available from
adobe
(and perhaps other font vendors).
If you save a CID font with a format other than PS CID or OpenType CID, then
only the currenly displayed subfont will be saved, with the current meaningless
character ordering (I suppose this is useful if you wish to extract a sub-font
from a CID font).
TTF (and OpenType) fonts will produce vertical metrics tables if the font
has vertical metrics enabled. Postscript encodings will not produce Metrics2
dictionaries (If someone actually wants this let me know, it can be done,
but I get the impression that nobody uses this any more).
On Mac OS/X, when generating a resource font containing a postscript font
then the fontname textfield will not be present (as the filename is determined
by the fontname). You can still select a directory however.
The bitmap sizes must all be present in the font database. AntiAliased fonts
can be indicated by following the pixelsize by "@<depth>" (ie. "@8").
If you are generating a bdf font then you will be prompted for a resolution
later.
If you generate a TrueType or OpenType font without the Apple mode set then
PfaEdit will generate GPOS and GSUB tables. These
contain kerning, ligature information, arabic forms data, anchor points, etc.
Apple does not support these two tables. If you set Apple mode then kerning
information will be stored in a kern table instead, but the other information
mentioned above will not be present (Apple probably has a mechanism for
specifying these data, but Apple's tables are much harder to parse and I
haven't implemented them yet).
Generate Mac Family
This
brings up a dialog very similar to the above, but with a few added fields.
Because this dialog is for Mac families, only Mac formats are supported.
Right above the [Save] button is a list of all fonts that PfaEdit thinks
should be included in this family, along with their bitmap info. If you don't
want a font to be in the family simply uncheck its checkbox.
-- Prev -- TOC --
Next --