On Mon, 24 Sep 2001, Lars [iso-8859-1] Hellstr�m wrote:
> At 11.42 +0200 2001-09-24, Giuseppe Ghib� wrote:
> >The second question is. Is there a table about choosing the
> >UniqueID to be used for each of the Metafont fonts converted to PFB? If
> >not how about to write one?
>
> I don't think that's a kosher idea. UniqueIDs exist to help a PS printer
> cache the result of rendering a font. Since MF -> PFB is not one-to-one,
> but in general one-to-many as some fonts have been converted several times,
> such a table would assign the same UniqueID to different PFBs. If you use
> the same UniqueID for a "cheapo" and a "luxo" conversion of the same font
> then you may find that the printer is using the "cheapo" conversion
> throughout, when that happens to be what got put in the cache. Furthermore
> the UniqueID is an optional entry in the font; what you may loose by not
> having it is merely some processing efficiency.
Well, I talked about UniqueID in general, not about SuperFont
specifically. The idea is to have this UniqueID to avoid this, i.e. to
avoid 27 kind of Type 1 conversion of the same fonts (of course
not considering the commercial ones which are not freely downloadable).
In other word to have (in the free fonts) only ONE official
conversion to Type-1 of the same Knuth, EC, etc. MetaFont fonts.
Up to not much time ago, the only free fonts available in Type 1 were the
BlueSky set of CMR/AMS (which were not covering all the sets), and which
were integrated on many TeX distributions, such as teTeX,
by some font from the Bakoma free set, some fonts
converted by TacoHoekwater (with MetaFog, if I remember right), and
not much time ago the TX/PX fonts.
Today with the availability of TeXtrace, mf2pt1, and PFAEdit,
I think the number of free converted fonts availabile in Type1 format
(which is a must for PDF files) is growing (for instance recently someone
used TeXtrace for converting MusiXTeX fonts to Type1), so possible there
should be a co-ordination to avoid overllaping and to do the same job
twice.
Bye.
Giuseppe.
