On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 09:42:38PM -0500, mathew wrote:
- If the .pfm and .pfb files are sufficient for Windows, why does mtxrun specifically search for .afm files and not also for .pfm?
Probably because mtxrun (and the rest of ConTeXt and LuaTeX) are written for Unix and ported to Windows, and Unix uses .afm files for metrics. (Except OS X, which is different for historical reasons.)
That and .afm files are much easier to work with because they're text files.
AFAIK, ConTeXt needs afm files to load type1 files, something related to encoding the font and ligatures/kerning. So you need bot afm and bfb/bfa files together somewhere context searches for fonts and it should work. PFM files are not needed at all (dunno what they are for actually, some obscure windows thing I guess).
But it might not be a bad idea for LuaTeX to automatically perform a pfm2afm conversion and cache the converted files when necessary, and probably not that hard to code. On the other hand, Type 1 fonts are legacy at this point, so it might not be worth it.
LuaTeX can load afm files thanks to the embedded, fontforge derived, font loader, but AFAIK it does not handle pfm files at all. Hans considers type1 fonts obsolete (and I agree with him :)) and he is unlikely to put much effort into supporting them. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Egyptian Arab