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Help me trace what type-1 => otf/cff conversion tool was used

vga
21.Jul.2008 12.09am
vga's picture

There’s an OpenType version of the GPL’d URW (ghostscript) fonts floating around. Unfortunately, the author of the conversion could not be identified. There’s some discussion of including these in Fedora Linux. I have a couple of questions for the experts:

1) I’d appreciate is someone can take a look and let me know what conversion tool was used. The otf version string (for Nimbus Regular) is “Version 1.500;PS 1.05;Core 1.0.38”. It looks like Adobe FDK was used. Am I correct?

2) As far as I can tell, the conversion was well done. Kerning uses the GSUB/kern method. If you have any critique of the conversion, don’t hold back.

Package here: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/Urw%20Gnu%20Opentype.zip

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Jens Kutilek
21.Jul.2008 6.09am
Jens Kutilek's picture

The conversion is not bad, but there’s a number of technical issues. I just looked into Century Schoolbook in FontLab, and tried to install and use the other ones. A few quick notes:

  • Some ISO Latin codepages are not supported, so there’s no language support for some European latin-based languages.
  • Kerning is there, but not very extensive, could be better when using class-based kerning.
  • Some glyphs have double unicodes, this is not recommended.
  • Some hinting errors
  • The Romanian cedilla/commaaccent issue is not taken into account.
  • dlig feature is wrong, Æ æ Œ œ are not ligatures but characters in their own right.
  • Not all fonts share the same glyph set.
  • Font names are a mess, especially when trying to use the fonts in Word Mac 2004. Some fonts appear in the menu but don’t display in text, some are accessible only through the style buttons but not all.
  • Nimbus Sans Condensed doesn’t show up at all in Word 2003’s font menu on Windows and in InDesign because of duplicate names.

edit: Did I really say “not bad”?

Jens


Thomas Phinney
21.Jul.2008 2.57pm
Thomas Phinney's picture

Yes, that does sound like the Adobe FDK for OpenType was used. However, it sounds like the fonts have signficant issues.

Cheers,

T


vga
22.Jul.2008 10.46am
vga's picture

Many thanks for the in-depth analysis.

I’m a bit confused about the kerning issue. It looks to me like the OpenType fonts have more kerning pairs than the originals. For instance, a010013l (URW Gothic L Book) has “StartKernPairs 998” in its original type-1 afm file, while the fea file that I exported from of the otf has 1851 pos statements in it’s kernHorizontalKerninginLatinloo table. Does this mean that the unknown person that did the conversion took the time to improve the kerning (even though it’s still lacking by expert standars), or is this some artifact of the conversion to OpenType?

The originals are here: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gs-fonts/gnu-gs-fonts-std-6.0.tar.gz?mo...