Re: man-pages PDF book: fonts

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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Hi Alex,

At 2024-03-22T18:35:02+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> I see that Debian provides the Tinos font in some package:
> 
> $ apt-file find -x Tinos.*pf
> texlive-fonts-extra: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/google/tinos/Tinos-Bold.pfb
> texlive-fonts-extra: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/google/tinos/Tinos-BoldItalic.pfb
> texlive-fonts-extra: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/google/tinos/Tinos-Italic.pfb
> texlive-fonts-extra: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/google/tinos/Tinos.pfb
> 
> The above is .pfb, not .pfa, which I don't understand and may not be
> usable for our purposes,

PFA and PFB are closely related font file formats.  Reputedly, they
stand for "PostScript" (or "Printer") "Font" "ASCII" or "Binary",
respectively.  PFB was much more widely used on MS-DOS, due either to
the meager disk space there, the 640kB RAM limit, or because it was
thought that the fonts would be "pirated" (or even understood) less
because the nature of their contents was less obvious.  Who knows?

Regardless, groff provides a tool for converting uncouth PFB to
civilized PFA.

$ apropos pfbtops
pfbtops (1)    - translate Printer Font Binary files to PostScript ASCII

The grops(1) and gropdf(1) man pages in groff 1.23.0 discuss using this
tool to prepare fonts so that groff can read them.

(Why not "pfbtopfa"?  Ghostscript was already using that name.  Why does
groff provide a tool that does the same thing?  Good question.  I don't
know.  It is not a young program--it is old.[1]  Maybe at one time groff
was portable to MS-DOS but Ghostscript was not.)

> Can we similarly get the Unifont for zh_CN PDFs?

As I understand it, GNU Unifont is a low-resolution bitmap font intended
for terminal emulators.[2]  I expect it would look offensively bad when
typeset.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n3211
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2tgZCabTzs
[2] https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html

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