Hi, in pdftex as of teTeX 2.96.2 there seems to be a problem with reading pk fonts, e. g. \font\aaa xbmc10 at 10pt \aaa hi \bye (xbmc10.mf see pdfetex.web. BTW, this xbmc10.mf is missing in teTeX) I get "bad pk file, expected pre" from readchar() of pkin.c, but the xbmc10.600pk is ok, starting with preamble 247. The problem is somehow, that the check_preamble is true even after the 1st byte read, so that later in pk file read suddenly a preamble check is done. This has somehow to do with t3_glyph_num in writepk() of writet3.c. The kludge, which seems to work, is to have some boolean checkpreamble=true; at the begin of writepk(), and then have the while loop like: while (readchar(checkpreamble, &cd) != 0) { checkpreamble=false; so that the header is only checked once at start of file read. But this might cover some problem with t3_glyph_num... Regards Hartmut