PostScript fonts working (sort-of)...& ? on Mac TTF fami

[sardisson]

This hint in the OOo FAQ enabled me to get Mac PS fonts working--sort of.

My test font is Adobe Caslon, which is Georgetown's "corporate font." I don't own the entire set of weights and styles, but what Adobe calls "Adobe Caslon (1-3)" and "Adobe Caslon Expert (16,17)" in the Mac screen suitcases and ACasIta, ACasOrn, ACasRegSC, ACasReg, and ACasSem in the Mac PS fonts.

I used fondu to generate .pfb files from the Mac PS. Put the pfb in /Applications/<OOo>/share/fonts/truetype and the .afm files (provided by Adobe when I bought the fonts but otherwise un-needed in my general Mac-ing) in an AFM subdirectory in said folder.

Fire up 1.1.2...

Issue 1: Read the full hint, Smokey; afm and pfb names must match! My .afms matched the name Adobe gave the Mac files; the fondu-created .pfbs reflected what I'm guessing are the internal PS font names. I renamed the .afms, but I imagine renaming the .pfbs would also have worked.

Fire up 1.1.2 again and voila, an Adobe Caslon entry in the font menu (albeit with the "double A" truetype symbol rather than a printer symbol, which I assume stands for the standard OOo PS fonts)

Issue 2: Half of my text comes out in Ornaments. Remove the Ornaments pfb and afm, restart OOo.

Bold and Italic [buttons] seem to work (ie, changes reflected on the screen), italic much better than bold.

Issue 3: Since OOo doesn't have a fancy font menu/selector (a la Apple's Cmd-T or recent Adobe apps, where one chooses the face in one menu/column and then can select the weight/style in another), I have no access to the SmallCaps version (unless it will happen to pop up randomly like the Ornaments did).

On one hand it certainly is nice that OOo merged the indivdual fonts into one family in the menu, on the other it somehow can't distinguish between the regular/bold/italics that "should" be joined and the Ornaments and SmallCaps which, at least in OOo, should not. (I'm also not positive the bold button is accessing the real ACaslon-Semibold font and not just faking the bold, since it looks poor in comparison to the italic.)

Question and possible avenue for exploration: what is different that makes OOo merge these fondu-generated PS fonts into one family and yet not merge the fondu-generated TT fonts into a family (the issue that was raised the other week here)?

(For comparison, NeoJ lists each style/weight differently, but some don't "work"--selecting the Italic font entry doesn't produce italicized text, but opening the same file in OOo 1.1.2 does. If anyone's interested, I've put the test file (made in NeoJ 0.8 by selecting the indiv font files) and PDFs made in NeoJ and OOo on my iDisk: http://homepage.mac.com/sardisson/ooo/psfont/)

Maybe this is helpful, maybe it is just me wasting everyone's time. What sort of fixes/additions/enhancements/Mac-specific-things are planned for OOo X11 between now and the release of OOo Aqua in 2006?

Smokey