[comp.fonts] Public Domain ATM/Windows fonts

gouvea@zariski.harvard.edu (Fernando Gouvea) (05/25/91)

I've just spent some time looking at font tables and sample output for a
lot of PD type 1 fonts for ATM and Windows.  Here are some
comments/questions:

1) A surprising number of fonts have rather basic problems, such as no
spaces or no right and left quotes.  The spaces problem is of course the
most troublesome, but, since I normally have "smart quotes" enabled in
WfW, the second also tends to produce garbage pretty quickly.

2) Perhaps less surprising, but still a bother, is the fact that many
(most?) of the fonts lack any accented characters, or have only an
idiosincratic selection.  I often write in Portuguese, and such fonts are
essentially useless.  In fact, my last name has a circumflex on the
e, and I don't particularly enjoy having to add it in by hand.

3) Most of these fonts seem to have been originally made for the Mac.  How
is the conversion done?  Does anyone out there know how to do it on a PC?
Could the problems with spaces have been introduced in the conversion
process?

All of which leads to a question:  is any font editor for type 1 fonts
(.pfm and .pfb files) available that will run on a PC (under Windows)?  I'd
like to at least attempt to fix some of the problems...

Thanks for any help.  Please e-mail, and I'll summarize if there is any
interest.

				Fernando Gouv^ea
				gouvea@heac.mast.queensu.ca