[xep-support] General fonts question

Nikolai Grigoriev grig at renderx.com
Wed Mar 24 12:10:00 PST 2004


John,

> We're converting from FOP to XEP for our in-house 
> DocBook->PDF toolchain.  I'm very happy so far 
> except for the small number of built-in fonts.

In XEP, only Adobe Base 14 fonts are treated as built-in;
all the rest shall be embedded. This is a feature of PDF, 
not of XEP.

> *   Is there some magic configuration thing we can tweak 
>     so that AcroRead and the printers use whatever font 
>     source they're currently using?

It cannot be automatic. XEP should be made aware of the font
metrics; it cannot invent them. I don't know how FOP is coping 
with the situation; perhaps they store metrics inside?

> *   Are there reasonably decent public-domain fonts out there?

Yes, quite a few. The first source of inspiration are font resources
in TeX packages and GhostScript. Many of these fonts are GPL; 
but this is a problem for us as makers of commercial software, 
not for you as a final non-profit user.

> *   If the only choice is to purchase them, whose should we buy?

It does not matter, actually. For safety, it might be easier to stick
to big names: Adobe, Agfa-Monotype, Linotype, ITC, etc.; 
but in general, any font on www.myfonts.com is good.

> At the moment I need only a small number of fonts:
>
>    Palatino: regular, italic, bold, bold italic, small-caps

A very close GPL analogue exists in GhostScript: Palladio.
The font is produced by a respected German foundry, 
URW++. GhostScript uses it to emulatePalatino in its 
PostScript interpreter. Look in the fonts/ directory of your 
GhostScript installation; fonts.dir is an index of the fonts. 
For XEP, you need an AFM and a PFB file for each 
outline variant.

>    Lucida Typewriter: regular, italic, bold, bold italic

A free analogue is LuxiMono, donated by Bigelow & Holmes
and URW++ to XFree86. You can take it e.g. from CTAN:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/LuxiMono/.
License is quite liberal. It has the same design (and 
the same authors :-)) as Lucida Typewriter, and is 
only slightly narrower. (In XEP, you can adjust 
the pitch by selecting an appropriate font-stretch 
value to scale the text horizontally; but IMHO
a narrower monospace font looks better).

Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX

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