Re: [groff] Wierd font troubles

[Dale Snell]

*P.S.  What's a .t1 file?*


> T1 = Type 1 font file
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1>. It's a PostScript
program with an encrypted subset of drawing commands
> which produce letterforms. Note that there's no standard file extension
for Type 1 fonts; pfa and
> pfb are typically more common (PFA and PFB are more-or-less the same,
except the latter uses
> raw binary whilst the former uses ASCII. PFA = "Printer Font ASCII", PFB
= "Printer Font Binary").

Thank you for the explanation.  I wondered if it might not be something
like that, but as I said, the only description I could find was for the MRI
files.  Is there any way to use a .t1 file in groff?  Convert it to .pfa,
for instance?  (I would not be surprised if the answer is no, but I thought
I should ask.)

*When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't build the groff fonts, and I
don't know why.*


> I've not looked too thoroughly into Groff's makefiles, but you shouldn't
need to run make to generate
> font descriptions from AFM files. Are you using the afmtodit binary (that
should be) available in your
> $PATH?

Make automatically runs BuildFoundries when Groff is built, it's in the
"build the URW++ Basic35 fonts" part of building Groff.  I didn't have to
do anything special.  And yes, afmtodit is in my $PATH.


*Then I created symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names and**ran
configure. Success!  Huzzah!*


> Needless to say, you shouldn't have to be doing that. This is something
that should really be fixed
> on Groff's end...

I'll certainly agree with that.  My thought is that Groff should simply
include the URW++ fonts by default.  Given that both Fedora and Debian have
deprecated Type1 support, it probably won't be too much longer before those
fonts won't be available from the distros' repositories at all.
Show quoted text
--Dale

-- 
"And finally, _thinking_ is an exercise to which all too few brains are
accustomed."  --E.E. "Doc" Smith, _First Lensman_

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019, 2:38 PM John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:

>
>>
>> *P.S.  What's a .t1 file?  My google-fu failed me; all I could find was
>> areference to "male MRI" files.  Funny, I didn't know that MRI files
>> hadgender.  At least, nobody said anything about it when my MRIs were
>> taken.*
>
>
> T1 = Type 1 font file
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1>. It's a
> PostScript program with an encrypted subset of drawing commands which
> produce letterforms. Note that there's no standard file extension for Type
> 1 fonts; pfa and pfb are typically more common (PFA and PFB are
> more-or-less the same, except the latter uses raw binary whilst the former
> uses ASCII. PFA = "Printer Font ASCII", PFB = "Printer Font Binary").
>
> *When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't build the groff fonts, and I
>> don't know why.*
>
>
> I've not looked too thoroughly into Groff's makefiles, but you shouldn't
> need to run make to generate font descriptions from AFM files. Are you
> using the afmtodit binary (that should be) available in your $PATH?
>
>
>> *Then I created symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names 
>> and**ran
>> configure. Success!  Huzzah!*
>
>
> Needless to say, you shouldn't have to be doing that. This is something
> that should really be fixed on Groff's end...
>
> On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 07:24, Dale Snell <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I just updated my computer to Fedora 29, and downloaded the latest version
>> of groff (1.22.4).  When I ran configure, it couldn't find the URW++
>> fonts.  Turned out I hadn't installed them.  D'oh!  Installed them, but
>> configure still couldn't find them.  I added the --with-urw-fonts-dir
>> option, but configure _still_ couldn't find them.  It took me some digging
>> (and pulling out what little hair I have left), but I found a couple of
>> problems:
>>
>>     1)  URW++ has changed their file names to something human-readable,
>> instead of the nigh-password-worthy names they used to use.
>>
>>     2)  URW++ no longer ships *.pfb files in their base35 fonts package.
>> Insead, they ship *.otf, *.afm, and *.t1 files.
>>
>> configure looks in the urw-base35 fonts directory
>> ("/usr/share/fonts/urw-base35" in Fedora) for "a010013l.pfb", which is now
>> "URWGothic-Book.pfb", to determine if the URW++ fonts are there.
>> Naturally, since the file didn't exist, it decided that there weren't any
>> fonts to install.  Thinking I could work around the problem, I used
>> FontForge to create .pfb files out of the .otf files.  Then I created
>> symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names and ran configure.
>> Success!  Huzzah!
>>
>> Alas, it was too soon to cheer.  When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't
>> build the groff fonts, and I don't know why.  The error message is:
>>
>>     "BuildFoundries: warning: line 77: Failed to create groff font 'U-AB'
>> by running afmtodit"
>>
>> where the line number increments by one for each groff font it can't
>> build.
>>
>> At this point I'm lost.  I am not a Perl programmer, so I don't know what
>> BuildFoundries is actually doing.  There is probably something very simple
>> going worng, but I don't know where to look.
>>
>> Anyway, I gave up on groff installing the fonts automatically and used
>> Peter Schaffter's "install-fonts.sh" script.  Worked like a charm (thanks
>> Peter!).  So I installed several other typeface families (Linux Libertine
>> and TeX Gyre, among others).  All was well, or so I thought.
>>
>> I did some work on a project file and ran it through groff (via pdfmom) to
>> build a PDF.  It seemed to have worked until I looked more closely.  Much
>> to my surprise, the ASCII single-quote character "'" which is supposed to
>> be rendered as a typographic single-quote, was still coming out as a
>> typewriter single-quote.  I tried changing font families and found
>> something very odd.  The fonts that groff installed work as expected.  The
>> ones I installed have the problem.  I have no idea why.  I can work around
>> the problem by adding a ".tr '\[cq]" line to the source file.  Still, I'd
>> like to know where things went wrong so that I can fix it.  Does anyone
>> have any suggestions?  Right now I have no idea where to start looking.
>>
>> --Dale
>>
>> P.S.  What's a .t1 file?  My google-fu failed me; all I could find was a
>> reference to "male MRI" files.  Funny, I didn't know that MRI files had
>> gender.  At least, nobody said anything about it when my MRIs were taken.
>>
>>
>> --
>> "And finally, _thinking_ is an exercise to which all too few brains are
>> accustomed."  --E.E. "Doc" Smith, _First Lensman_
>>
>