1TTF2PT1(1) TTF2PT1 Font Converter TTF2PT1(1)
2
6 TTF2PT1 - A True Type to PostScript Type 1 Font Converter
7
9 "ttf2pt1 [-options] ttffont.ttf [Fontname]"
10 or
12 "ttf2pt1 [-options] ttffont.ttf -"
14
16 Ttf2pt1 is a font converter from the True Type format (and some other
17 formats supported by the FreeType library as well) to the Adobe Type1
18 format.
19 The versions 3.0 and later got rather extensive post-processing
21 algorithm that brings the converted fonts to the requirements of the
22 Type1 standard, tries to correct the rounding errors introduced during
23 conversions and some simple kinds of bugs that are typical for the
24 public domain TTF fonts. It also generates the hints that enable much
25 better rendering of fonts in small sizes that are typical for the
26 computer displays. But everything has its price, and some of the
27 optimizations may not work well for certain fonts. That's why the
28 options were added to the converter, to control the performed
29 optimizations.
30
32 The first variant creates the file "Fontname.pfa" (or "Fontname.pfb" if
33 the option '-b' was used) with the converted font and "Fontname.afm"
34 with the font metrics, the second one prints the font or another file
35 (if the option '-G' was used) on the standard output from where it can
36 be immediately piped through some filter. If no "Fontname" is specified
37 for the first variant, the name is generated from "ttffont" by
38 replacing the ".ttf" filename suffix.
39 Most of the time no options are neccessary (with a possible exception
41 of '-e'). But if there are some troubles with the resulting font, they
42 may be used to control the conversion. The options are:
43 · "-a" - Include all the glyphs from the source file into the converted
45 file. If this option is not specified then only the glyphs that have
46 been assigned some encoding are included, because the rest of glyphs
47 would be inaccessible anyway and would only consume the disk space.
48 But some applications are clever enough to change the encoding on the
49 fly and thus use the other glyphs, in this case they could benefit
50 from using this option. But there is a catch: the X11 library has
51 rather low limit for the font size. Including more glyphs increases
52 the file size and thus increases the chance of hitting this limit.
53 · "-b" - Encode the resulting font to produce a ready ".pfb" file.
55 · "-d suboptions" - Debugging options. The suboptions are:
57 "a" - Print out the absolute coordinates of dots in outlines. Such a
59 font can not be used by any program (that's why this option is
60 incompatible with '-e') but it has proven to be a valuable debuging
61 information.
62 "r" - Do not reverse the direction of outlines. The TTF fonts have
64 the standard direction of outlines opposite to the Type1 fonts. So
65 they should be reversed during proper conversion. This option may be
66 used for debugging or to handle a TTF font with wrong direction of
67 outlines (possibly, converted in a broken way from a Type1 font). The
68 first signs of the wrong direction are the letters like "P" or "B"
69 without the unpainted "holes" inside.
70 · "-e" - Assemble the resulting font to produce a ready ".pfa" file.
72 [ S.B.: Personally I don't think that this option is particularly
74 useful. The same result may be achieved by piping the unassembled
75 data through t1asm, the Type 1 assembler. And, anyways, it's good to
76 have the t1utils package handy. But Mark and many users think that
77 this functionality is good and it took not much time to add this
78 option. ]
79 · "-F" - Force the Unicode encoding: any type of MS encoding specified
81 in the font is ignored and the font is treated like it has Unicode
82 encoding. WARNING: this option is intended for buggy fonts which
83 actually are in Unicode but are marked as something else. The effect
84 on the other fonts is unpredictable.
85 · "-G suboptions" - File generation options. The suboptions may be
87 lowercase or uppercase, the lowercase ones disable the generation of
88 particular files, the corresponding uppercase suboptions enable the
89 generation of the same kind of files. If the result of ttf2pt1 is
90 requested to be printed on the standard output, the last enabling
91 suboption of -G determines which file will be written to the standard
92 output and the rest of files will be discarded. For example, -G A
93 will request the AFM file. The suboptions to disable/enable the
94 generation of the files are:
95 "f/F" - The font file. Depending on the other options this file will
97 have one of the suffixes ".t1a", ".pfa" or ".pfb". If the conversion
98 result is requested on the standard output ('"-"' is used as the
99 output file name) then the font file will also be written there by
100 default, if not overwritten by another suboption of -G. Default:
101 enabled
102 "a/A" - The Adobe font metrics file (".afm"). Default: enabled
104 "e/E" - The dvips encoding file (".enc"). Default: disabled
106 · "-l language[+argument]" - Extract the fonts for the specified
108 language from a multi-language Unicode font. If this option is not
109 used the converter tries to guess the language by the values of the
110 shell variable LANG. If it is not able to guess the language by LANG
111 it tries all the languages in the order they are listed.
112 After the plus sign an optional argument for the language extractor
114 may be specified. The format of the argument is absolutely up to the
115 particular language converter. The primary purpose of the argument is
116 to support selection of planes for the multi-plane Eastern encodings
117 but it can also be used in any other way. The language extractor may
118 decide to add the plane name in some form to the name of the
119 resulting font. None of the currently supported languages make any
120 use of the argument yet.
121 As of now the following languages are supported:
123 "latin1" - for all the languages using the Latin-1 encoding
125 "latin2" - for the Central European languages
127 "latin4" - for the Baltic languages
129 "latin5" - for the Turkish language
131 "cyrillic" - for the languages with Cyrillic alphabet
133 "russian" - historic synonym for cyrillic
135 "bulgarian" - historic synonym for cyrillic
137 "adobestd" - for the AdobeStandard encoding used by TeX
139 "plane+argument" - to select one plane from a multi-byte encoding
141 The argument of the ""plane"" language may be in one of three forms:
143 "plane+pid=<pid>,eid=<eid>"
145 "plane+pid=<pid>,eid=<eid>,<plane_number>"
147 "plane+<plane_number>"
149 Pid (TTF platform id) and eid (TTF encoding id) select a particular
151 TTF encoding table in the original font. They are specified as
152 decimal numbers. If this particular encoding table is not present in
153 the font file then the conversion fails. The native ("ttf") front-end
154 parser supports only pid=3 (Windows platform), the FreeType-based
155 ("ft") front-end supports any platform. If pid/eid is not specified
156 then the TTF encoding table is determined as usual: Unicode encoding
157 if it's first or an 8-bit encoding if not (and for an 8-bit encoding
158 the plane number is silently ignored). To prevent the converter from
159 falling back to an 8-bit encoding, specify the Unicode pid/eid value
160 explicitly.
161 Plane_number is a hexadecimal (if starts with "0x") or decimal
163 number. It gives the values of upper bytes for which 256 characters
164 will be selected. If not specified, defaults to 0. It is also used as
165 a font name suffix (the leading "0x" is not included into the
166 suffix).
167 NOTE: You may notice that the language names are not uniform: some
169 are the names of particular languages and some are names of
170 encodings. This is because of the different approaches. The original
171 idea was to implement a conversion from Unicode to the appropriate
172 Windows encoding for a given language. And then use the translation
173 tables to generate the fonts in whatever final encodings are needed.
174 This would allow to pile together the Unicode fonts and the non-
175 Unicode Windows fonts for that language and let the program to sort
176 them out automatically. And then generate fonts in all the possible
177 encodings for that language. An example of this approach is the
178 Russian language support. But if there is no multiplicity of
179 encodings used for some languages and if the non-Unicode fonts are
180 not considered important by the users, another way would be simpler
181 to implement: just provide only one table for extraction of the
182 target encoding from Unicode and don't bother with the translation
183 tables. The latin* "languages" are examples of this approach. If
184 somebody feels that he needs the Type1 fonts both in Latin-* and
185 Windows encodings he or she is absolutely welcome to submit the code
186 to implement it.
187 WARNING: Some of the glyphs included into the AdobeStandard encoding
189 are not included into the Unicode standard. The most typical examples
190 of such glyphs are ligatures like 'fi', 'fl' etc. Because of this the
191 font designers may place them at various places. The converter tries
192 to do its best, if the glyphs have honest Adobe names and/or are
193 placed at the same codes as in the Microsoft fonts they will be
194 picked up. Otherwise a possible solution is to use the option '-L'
195 with an external map.
196 · "-L file[+[pid=<pid>,eid=<eid>,][plane]]" - Extract the fonts for the
198 specified language from a multi-language font using the map from this
199 file. This is rather like the option '-l' but the encoding map is not
200 compiled into the program, it's taken from that file, so it's easy to
201 edit. Examples of such files are provided in
202 "maps/adobe-standard-encoding.map", "CP1250.map". (NOTE: the
203 'standard encoding' map does not include all the glyphs of the
204 AdobeStandard encoding, it's provided only as an example.) The
205 description of the supported map formats is in the file
206 "maps/unicode-sample.map".
207 Likewise to '-l', an argument may be specified after the map file
209 name. But in this case the argument has fixed meaning: it selects the
210 original TTF encoding table (the syntax is the same as in '-l plane')
211 and/or a plane of the map file. The plane name also gets added after
212 dash to the font name. The plane is a concept used in the Eastern
213 fonts with big number of glyphs: one TTF font gets divided into
214 multiple Type1 fonts, each containing one plane of up to 256 glyphs.
215 But with a little creativity this concept may be used for other
216 purposes of combining multiple translation maps into one file. To
217 extract multiple planes from a TTF font "ttf2pt1" must be run
218 multiple times, each time with a different plane name specified.
219 The default original TTF encoding table used for the option '-L' is
221 Unicode. The map files may include directives to specify different
222 original TTF encodings. However if the pid/eid pair is specified with
223 it overrides any original encoding specified in the map file.
224 · "-m type=value" - Set maximal or minimal limits of resources. These
226 limits control the the font generation by limiting the resources that
227 the font is permitted to require from the PostScript interpreter.
228 The currently supported types of limits are:
229 "h" - the maximal hint stack depth for the substituted hints. The
231 default value is 128, according to the limitation in X11. This seems
232 to be the lowest (and thus the safest) widespread value. To display
233 the hint stack depth required by each glyph in a ".t1a" file use the
234 script "ttf2pt1_cntstems".
235 · "-O suboptions" - Outline processing options. The suboptions may be
237 lowercase or uppercase, the lowercase ones disable the features, the
238 corresponding uppercase suboptions enable the same features. The
239 suboptions to disable/enable features are:
240 "b/B" - Guessing of the ForceBold parameter. This parameter helps the
242 Type1 engine to rasterize the bold fonts properly at small sizes.
243 But the algorithm used to guess the proper value of this flag makes
244 that guess based solely on the font name. In rare cases that may
245 cause errors, in these cases you may want to disable this guessing.
246 Default: enabled
247 "h/H" - Autogeneration of hints. The really complex outlines may
249 confuse the algorithm, so theoretically it may be useful sometimes to
250 disable them. Although up to now it seems that even bad hints are
251 better than no hints at all. Default: enabled
252 "u/U" - Hint substitution. Hint substitution is a technique
254 permitting generation of more detailed hints for the rasterizer. It
255 allows to use different sets of hints for different parts of a glyph
256 and change these sets as neccessary during rasterization (that's why
257 "substituted"). So it should improve the quality of the fonts
258 rendered at small sizes. But there are two catches: First, the X11
259 library has rather low limit for the font size. More detailed hints
260 increase the file size and thus increase the chance of hitting this
261 limit (that does not mean that you shall hit it but you may if your
262 fonts are particularly big). This is especially probable for Unicode
263 fonts converted with option '-a', so you may want to use '-a'
264 together with '-Ou'. Second, some rasterizers (again, X11 is the
265 typical example) have a limitation for total number of hints used
266 when drawing a glyph (also known as the hint stack depth). If that
267 stack overflows the glyph is ignored. Starting from version 3.22
268 "ttf2pt1" uses algorithms to minimizing this depth, with the trade-
269 off of slightly bigger font files. The glyphs which still exceed the
270 limit set by option '-mh' have all the substituted hints removed and
271 only base hints left. The algorithms seem to have been refined far
272 enough to make the fonts with substituted hints look better than the
273 fonts without them or at least the same. Still if the original fonts
274 are not well-designed the detailed hinting may emphasize the defects
275 of the design, such as non-even thickness of lines. So provided that
276 you are not afraid of the X11 bug the best idea would be to generate
277 a font with this feature and without it, then compare the results
278 using the program "ttf2pt1_cmpf" (see the description in
279 "other/README") and decide which one looks better. Default: enabled
280 "o/O" - Space optimization of the outlines' code. This kind of
282 optimization never hurts, and the only reason to disable this feature
283 is for comparison of the generated fonts with the fonts generated by
284 the previous versions of converter. Well, it _almost_ never hurts. As
285 it turned out there exist some brain-damaged printers which don't
286 understand it. Actually this feature does not change the outlines at
287 all. The Type 1 font manual provides a set of redundant operators
288 that make font description shorter, such as '10 hlineto' instead of
289 '0 10 rlineto' to describe a horizontal line. This feature enables
290 use of these operators. Default: enabled
291 "s/S" - Smoothing of outlines. If the font is broken in some way
293 (even the ones that are not easily noticeable), such smoothing may
294 break it further. So disabling this feature is the first thing to be
295 tried if some font looks odd. But with smoothing off the hint
296 generation algorithms may not work properly too. Default: enabled
297 "t/T" - Auto-scaling to the 1000x1000 Type1 standard matrix. The TTF
299 fonts are described in terms of an arbitrary matrix up to 4000x4000.
300 The converted fonts must be scaled to conform to the Type1 standard.
301 But the scaling introduces additional rounding errors, so it may be
302 curious sometimes to look at the font in its original scale.
303 Default: enabled
304 "v/V" - Do vectorization on the bitmap fonts. Functionally
306 "vectorization" is the same thing as "autotracing", a different word
307 is used purely to differentiate it from the Autotrace library. It
308 tries to produce nice smooth outlines from bitmaps. This feature is
309 still a work in progress though the results are already mostly
310 decent. Default: disabled
311 "w/W" - Glyphs' width corection. This option is designed to be used
313 on broken fonts which specify too narrow widths for the letters. You
314 can tell that a font can benefit from this option if you see that the
315 characters are smashed together without any whitespace between them.
316 This option causes the converter to set the character widths to the
317 actual width of this character plus the width of a typical vertical
318 stem. But on the other hand the well-designed fonts may have
319 characters that look better if their widths are set slightly
320 narrower. Such well-designed fonts will benefit from disabling this
321 feature. You may want to convert a font with and without this
322 feature, compare the results and select the better one. This feature
323 may be used only on proportional fonts, it has no effect on the
324 fixed-width fonts. Default: disabled
325 "z/Z" - Use the Autotrace library on the bitmap fonts. The results
327 are horrible and the use of this option is not recommended. This
328 option is present for experimental purposes. It may change or be
329 removed in the future. The working tracing can be achieved with
330 option "-OV". Default: disabled
331 · "-p parser_name" - Use the specified front-end parser to read the
333 font file. If this option is not used, ttf2pt1 selects the parser
334 automatically based on the suffix of the font file name, it uses the
335 first parser in its list that supports this font type. Now two
336 parsers are supported:
337 "ttf" - built-in parser for the ttf files (suffix ".ttf")
339 "bdf" - built-in parser for the BDF files (suffix ".bdf")
341 "ft" - parser based on the FreeType-2 library (suffixes ".ttf",
343 ".otf", ".pfa", ".pfb")
344 The parser "ft" is NOT linked in by default. See "Makefile" for
346 instructions how to enable it. We do no support this parser on
347 Windows: probably it will work but nobody tried and nobody knows how
348 to build it.
349 The conversion of the bitmap fonts (such as BDF) is simplistic yet,
351 producing jagged outlines. When converting such fonts, it might be a
352 good idea to turn off the hint substitution (using option -Ou)
353 because the hints produced will be huge but not adding much to the
354 quality of the fonts.
355 · "-u number" - Mark the font with this value as its UniqueID. The
357 UniqueID is used by the printers with the hard disks to cache the
358 rasterized characters and thus significantly speed-up the printing.
359 Some of those printers just can't store the fonts without UniqueID on
360 their disk.The problem is that the ID is supposed to be unique, as it
361 name says. And there is no easy way to create a guaranteed unique ID.
362 Adobe specifies the range 4000000-4999999 for private IDs but still
363 it's difficult to guarantee the uniqueness within it. So if you don't
364 really need the UniqueID don't use it, it's optional. Luckily there
365 are a few millions of possible IDs, so the chances of collision are
366 rather low. If instead of the number a special value '"A"' is given
367 then the converter generates the value of UniqueID automatically, as
368 a hash of the font name. (NOTE: in the version 3.22 the algorithm
369 for autogeneration of UniqueID was changed to fit the values into the
370 Adobe-spacified range. This means that if UniqueIDs were used then
371 the printer's cache may need to be flushed before replacing the fonts
372 converted by an old version with fonts converted by a newer version).
373 A simple way to find if any of the fonts in a given directory have
374 duplicated UniqueIDs is to use the command:
375 " cat *.pf[ab] | grep UniqueID | sort | uniq -c | grep -v ' 1 '"
377 Or if you use "ttf2pt1_convert" it will do that for you automatically
379 plus it will also give the exact list of files with duplicate UIDs.
380 · "-v size" - Re-scale the font to get the size of a typical uppercase
382 letter somewhere around the specified size. Actually, it re-scales
383 the whole font to get the size of one language-dependent letter to be
384 at least of the specified size. Now this letter is "A" in all the
385 supported languages. The size is specified in the points of the Type
386 1 coordinate grids, the maximal value is 1000. This is an
387 experimental option and should be used with caution. It tries to
388 increase the visible font size for a given point size and thus make
389 the font more readable. But if overused it may cause the fonts to
390 look out of scale. As of now the interesting values of size for this
391 option seem to be located mostly between 600 and 850. This re-scaling
392 may be quite useful but needs more experience to understand the
393 balance of its effects.
394 · "-W level" - Select the verbosity level of the warnings. Currently
396 the levels from 0 to 4 are supported. Level 0 means no warnings at
397 all, level 4 means all the possible warnings. The default level is 3.
398 Other levels may be added in the future, so using the level number 99
399 is recommended to get all the possible warnings. Going below level 2
400 is not generally recommended because you may miss valuable
401 information about the problems with the fonts being converted.
402 · Obsolete option: "-A" - Print the font metrics (.afm file) instead of
404 the font on STDOUT. Use -GA instead.
405 · Very obsolete option:
407 The algorithm that implemented the forced fixed width had major
409 flaws, so it was disabled. The code is still in the program and some
410 day it will be refined and returned back. Meanwhile the option name
411 '-f' was reused for another option. The old version was:
412 "-f" - Don't try to force the fixed width of font. Normally the
414 converter considers the fonts in which the glyph width deviates by
415 not more than 5% as buggy fixed width fonts and forces them to have
416 really fixed width. If this is undesirable, it can be disabled by
417 this option.
418 The ".pfa" font format supposes that the description of the characters
420 is binary encoded and encrypted. This converter does not encode or
421 encrypt the data by default, you have to specify the option '-e' or use
422 the "t1asm" program to assemble (that means, encode and encrypt) the
423 font program. The "t1asm" program that is included with the converter
424 is actually a part of the "t1utils" package, rather old version of
425 which may be obtained from
426 http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/t1utils.tar.gz
428 Note that "t1asm" from the old version of that package won't work
430 properly with the files generated by "ttf2pt1" version 3.20 and later.
431 Please use "t1asm" packaged with "ttf2pt1" or from the new version
432 "t1utils" instead. For a newer version of "t1utils" please look at
433 http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/
435
437 So, the following command lines:
438 "ttf2pt1 -e ttffont.ttf t1font"
440 "ttf2pt1 ttffont.ttf - | t1asm >t1font.pfa"
442 represent two ways to get a working font. The benefit of the second
444 form is that other filters may be applied to the font between the
445 converter and assembler.
446
448 · /usr/share/ttf2pt1/*
449 · /usr/share/ttf2pt1/scripts/*
451 · /usr/share/doc/ttf2pt1-3.4.4/other/*
453 · /usr/share/doc/ttf2pt1-3.4.4/README
455 · /usr/share/doc/ttf2pt1-3.4.4/FONTS
457
459 · ttf2pt1_convert(1)
460 · ttf2pt1_x2gs(1)
462 · t1asm(1)
464 · ttf2pt1-announce@lists.sourceforge.net
466 The mailing list with announcements about ttf2pt1. It is a
468 moderated mailing with extremely low traffic. Everyone is
469 encouraged to subscribe to keep in touch with the current status of
470 project. To subscribe use the Web interface at
471 http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-announce. If
472 you have only e-mail access to the Net then send a subscribe
473 request to the development mailing list
474 ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and somebody will help you with
475 subscription.
476 · ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
478 ttf2pt1-users@lists.sourceforge.net
480 The ttf2pt1 mailing lists for development and users issues. They
482 have not that much traffic either. To subscribe use the Web
483 interface at
484 http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-devel and
485 http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/ttf2pt1-users. If
486 you have only e-mail access to the Net then send a subscribe
487 request to the development mailing list
488 ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and somebody will help you with
489 subscription.
490 · http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net
492 The main page of the project.
494 http://www.netspace.net.au/~mheath/ttf2pt1/
496 The old main page of the project.
498
500 It seems that many Eastern fonts use features of the TTF format that
501 are not supported by the ttf2pt1's built-in front-end parser. Because
502 of this for now we recommend using the FreeType-based parser (option
503 '-p ft') with the ""plane"" language.
504 Troubleshooting and bug reports
506 Have problems with conversion of some font ? The converter dumps core ?
507 Or your printer refuses to understand the converted fonts ? Or some
508 characters are missing ? Or some characters look strange ?
509 Send the bug reports to the ttf2pt1 development mailing list at
511 ttf2pt1-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.
512 Try to collect more information about the problem and include it into
514 the bug report. (Of course, even better if you would provide a ready
515 fix, but just a detailed bug report is also good). Provide detailed
516 information about your problem, this will speed up the response
517 greatly. Don't just write "this font looks strange after conversion"
518 but describe what's exactly wrong with it: for example, what characters
519 look wrong and what exactly is wrong about their look. Providing a link
520 to the original font file would be also a good idea. Try to do a little
521 troublehooting and report its result. This not only would help with the
522 fix but may also give you a temporary work-around for the bug.
523 First, enable full warnings with option '-W99', save them to a file and
525 read carefully. Sometimes the prolem is with a not implemented feature
526 which is reported in the warnings. Still, reporting about such problems
527 may be a good idea: some features were missed to cut corners, in hope
528 that no real font is using them. So a report about a font using such a
529 feature may motivate someone to implement it. Of course, you may be the
530 most motivated person: after all, you are the one wishing to convert
531 that font. ;-) Seriously, the philosophy "scrath your own itch" seems
532 to be the strongest moving force behind the Open Source software.
533 The next step is playing with the options. This serves a dual purpose:
535 on one hand, it helps to localize the bug, on the other hand you may be
536 able to get a working version of the font for the meantime while the
537 bug is being fixed. The typical options to try out are: first '-Ou', if
538 it does not help then '-Os', then '-Oh', then '-Oo'. They are
539 described in a bit more detail above. Try them one by one and in
540 combinations. See if with them the resulting fonts look better.
541 On some fonts ttf2pt1 just crashes. Commonly that happens because the
543 font being converted is highly defective (although sometimes the bug is
544 in ttf2pt1 itself). In any case it should not crash, so the reports
545 about such cases will help to handle these defects properly in future.
546 We try to respond to the bug reports in a timely fashion but alas, this
548 may not always be possible, especially if the problem is complex. This
549 is a volunteer project and its resources are limited. Because of this
550 we would appreciate bug reports as detailed as possible, and we would
551 appreciate the ready fixes and contributions even more.
552
554 Based on ttf2pfa by Andrew Weeks, and help from Frank Siegert.
555 Modification by Mark Heath.
557 Further modification by Sergey Babkin.
559 The Type1 assembler by I. Lee Hetherington with modifications by Kai-
561 Uwe Herbing.
562version 3.4.4 December 31, 2003 TTF2PT1(1)