OpenType .otf fonts and printing

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael A Peters <mpeters at mac.com> writes:

Michael> Type 1 outline OpenType fonts work very well through
Michael> fontconfig, but it seems that they do not print.

As you've found support for sfnt/cff fonts is not as exhaustive as it
ought to be.  Part of the problem is that not everyone knows how to
embed them into a postscript or pdf stream (or file).  There are just
enough differences that it takes new code, and there is no library yet
providing that code.  

(Actually the latest versions of QT may have such library level
support, but even there many packages -- including kde 3.x --
are written to the QT3.x api and need to be ported to QT4.x.)

Some packages have added support (eg scribus 1.3.x) and some will
eventually (eg Abiword).  If libgnomeprint-2.12 has support for
embedding sfnt/cff then many more applications will, too.

An interm solution is to follow what is being done for TeX.  The lcdf
type tools (available at http://www.lcdf.org/type/) now include
several tools for otf (aka sfnt/cff) fonts.  Specifically you want to
use cfftot1 to convert either raw cff fonts or sfnt/cff fonts into
type1 fonts.  This will be more robust than using fontforge and
probably less likely to cause licensing problems.

(Embedding a sfnt/cff font into level 1 or 'early' level 2 postscript
requires doing this anyway, so leaving the type1 representation on
disk shouldn't be an issue, but of course ymmv....)

Note though that converting to t1 format looses all of the opentype
features.  All of the glyphs are still there but you may not be able
to access them.  So this is only an *interm* solution.

-JimC
-- 
James H. Cloos, Jr. <cloos at jhcloos.com>