Formatting Information

Put the files into a temporary directory

This is /tmp on Unix & GNU/Linux, including Apple Macintosh OS X; C:\tmp or C:\temp on Windows 95–XP; and should be Computer\System\Users\your~name\tmp on Windows 7 and up.

Decide on the short font name to use inside LATEX.

This is not the full descriptive name (eg Baskerville Italic Bold Extended) but an encoded font name in the format fnnsseev, devised by Karl Berry, which stores the same information in no more than eight characters for compatibility with systems which cannot handle long filenames (and incidentally makes it far easier to type). The letters in the format above have the following meanings (see the fontname documentation on your computer for more details). Lists of the codes used are in the files supplier.map, weight.map, width.map, variant.map, and the various .map files for each foundry, which are in your TEX installation.

The fonts/map/fontname directory in your main (not local) installation directory of TEX has files for several foundries giving fully-formed names like these for common fonts (eg ptmr8r is [Adobe] Post­Script Times Roman in an 8–bit revised TEX encoding; bgslly is Bitstream Gill Sans Light in Y&Y’s TEX’n’ANSI encoding [LY1]). Read the documentation in ‘’ to find out how to make up your own short names if the foundry and font you want is not shown in the lists in the fonts/map/fontname directory.

In this example we’ll call our mythical example typeface ‘zork’ (standing for Zfonts Ordinary Bookface: z for a foundry otherwise undefined; or for Ordinary; and k is the letter used for Book designs, b being already the code for bold). We’ll assume the font comes in the two files foo.afm and foo.pfb that I mentioned above.

While the font/map/fontname directories have ready-made maps of these names for popular collections of typefaces, making them up requires some knowledge of typographic terms and a careful reading of the fontname documentation.

Decide on your encoding

Encoding is needed because Adobe fonts store their characters in different places to the TEX standard. This is what tripped me up the first few times until someone pointed me at Y&Y’s TEX’n’ANSI encoding which at the time was the only one that included the glyphs I want where I expected them to be. Now, however, I recommend using the 8r encoding for all PostScript fonts. The encoding vector file 8r.enc should be in your main (not local) TEX installation directory in fonts/enc/dvips/base.

To avoid having to type the long path each time below, just copy this file to the temporary directory where you’re doing all this stuff.

Convert the .afm files to .tfm and .vf format

The Adobe Font Metric files have to be converted to TEX Font Metric and Virtual Font files. The afm2tfm and vptovf programs are standard TEX utilities in the bin directory of your main TEX installation.

In a command window, we type:

afm2tfm foo.afm -v zork8r.vpl -p 8r.enc rzork8r.tfm >zork.id

This reads foo.afm using the 8r.enc encoding file, and creates a special ‘raw’ TEX Font Metric file (hence the r prefix on rzork8r.tfm) that LATEX can use, with a list of all its properties encoded with 8r in the .vpl or Virtual Property List file.

Many people will tell you that virtual fonts are dead and that this is the wrong way to do it, but no-one has ever shown me an alternative that works, so I stick with it.

Small caps (optional)

If you want a small caps variant faked up (perhaps because the typeface family doesn’t have a real small-caps font), repeat the medicine like this:

afm2tfm foo.afm -V zork8rc.vpl -p 8r.enc rzork8r.tfm >>zork.id

Note the capital V option here. Yes, it does overwrite the rzorkly.tfm created in the first command — it doesn’t matter; let it (it will be the same information, anyway). And those are two ‘greater-than’ signs before the zork.id filename because we want to append to it, not overwrite it.

Create the virtual font

The vptovf program turns the .vpl files into .vf and .tfm pairs. LATEX uses these to map the character positions from Adobe’s encoding to its own.

vptovf zork8r.vpl zork8r.vf zork8r.tfm
vptovf zork8rc.vpl zork8rc.vf zork8rc.tfm

Make directories to hold the files

Under your Personal TEX Directory, create a fonts subdirectory, and in it, create an afm, tfm, type1, and vf subsubdirectories (they may already exist from a previous font installation)

In each of these four, create a subdirectory for the foundry, making up a name if it’s not an established one (see the suppliers.map file)

Within each of the foundry directories, create a directory for the typeface (using an abbreviated human-readable typeface name, NOT the short Karl Berry fontname). On my computer, this means doing:

cd ~/texmf/fonts 
mkdir -p afm/zfonts/zork
mkdir -p tfm/zfonts/zork 
mkdir -p type1/zfonts/zork
mkdir -p vf/zfonts/zork 
cd /tmp

Under Windows, where the mkdir has no /p option, you probably have to create each subsubdirectory individually.

Copy the files to their rightful places

Copy the four groups of files to the four new directories:

cp *.afm ~/texmf/fonts/afm/zfonts/zork/
cp *.tfm ~/texmf/fonts/tfm/zfonts/zork/
cp *.pfb ~/texmf/fonts/type1/zfonts/zork/
cp *.vf ~/texmf/fonts/vf/zfonts/zork/

where ~/texmf is the root of your Personal TEX Directory. You can of course do all this with a directory window and mouse if you find it easier.

Create a font map

The font map is what tells TEX’s font driver which PFB file to use for which font.

Open your editor and create a new file (if it asks for a name, call it zor.map)

Font entries MUST be on a single line each, with no line-breaking. Each entry has five fields separated by a space: a ) the short fontname; b ) the full (Adobe) font name; c ) the PostScript encoding parameters (in quotes, with a leading and trailing space); d ) the encoding file used; and e ) the name of the PostScript outline file. Fortunately, we captured almost all of this in those .id files in step 2 above, so all you need to do is copy all those .id files into this file (eg cat *.id >>zor.map), and add a space and the less-than sign and the name of the appropriate .pfb file to the end of each line, eg

rzork8r ZorkOrdinary-Book " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont " <8r.enc <zork.pfb

Save the file in fonts/map in your Personal TEX Directory

Update the map file into your TEX’s file maps with the command:

updmap --enable Map=zor.map

Create a style file

LATEX needs a style file to implement the interface to the font. Call it after the typeface or something related; in this example we’ll call it foozork.sty and it needs to be saved into tex/latex/zork/ in your Personal TEX Directory.

In it go some details of the name and date we did this, what version of LATEX it needs, and any other command necessary to operate the font, like the font encoding and whether it is to supersede the current default Roman font.

Use your editor to open (create) this file

Insert the following lines (obviously replacing the foozork stuff with meaningful values for your own fonts:

% foozork - LaTeX style file for the Zork font
\def\fileversion{1.0}
\def\filedate{2016/12/03}
\def\docdate{2016/12/03}
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{foozork}[\filedate\space
    \fileversion\space 
    Zfonts Ordinary PSNFSS2e package]
\RequirePackage[T1]{fontenc}
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{zor}
\endinput

Note the following:

• The first argument to \ProvidesPackage  MUST be the same as this style file name;

• If this is a typewriter font, change the renewed command \rmdefault into \ttdefault. If it’s a sans-serif font, make it \sfdefault instead.

  Omit this command completely if you don’t want the style file to supersede the current defaults but simply to make the font available for manual use.

• If you do that, you probably want to write a new command or two to use it, typically one unscoped command for grouped use and one scoped one for argument use:

\newcommand{\zork}{\fontencoding{T1}%
  \fontfamily{zor}\selectfont}
\newcommand{\textzork}[1]{{\zork#1}}

Save and close the file.

Create the Font Definition file

The last file needed is the font definition (.fd) file. This is named following the pattern eefnn.fd, using the same conventions as before, by prepending the (lowercase) encoding abbreviation to the foundry letter and fontname abbreviation, so our example would be t1zor.fd for the T1 (8r) encoding and the zor short fontname.

Use your editor to create the file in ~/texmf/tex/latex/zork (replacing zork with the name of the directory you created there).

Enter the following lines (see the notes below about what they mean):

\ProvidesFile{t1zor.fd}[2016/12/03 v0.1 manual 
              font definitions for T1/zor.]

\DeclareFontFamily{T1}{zor}{}

\DeclareFontShape{T1}{zor}{k}{n}{<-> zork8r}{}
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{zor}{k}{sc}{<-> zork8rc}{}

Save and close the file.