I wanted to use one of my favorite fonts, Crimson, while still maintaining full support from the microtype
package. Since XeTeX and LuaTeX are not fully supported by the microtype
package (as of version 2.5, beta 08, "adjustment of interword spacing and of kerning only works with pdfTeX (≥ 1.40)"), I was forced to convert the Crimson font files from the OTF
format to the Type 1 format used by (pdf)TeX. In the process of using otftotfm
to convert the font files to Type1 format, I encountered some concerns that I would like to address.
- When I converted the
OTF
files to the Type 1 format usingT1
encoding,otftotfm
displayed the following warning.
$ sudo otftotfm -e ec -fcalt -fdlig -ffrac -fkern -fonum -fordn -fpnum -fsinf -fsmcp -fsubs -fsups -fzero --vendor sebastiankosch Crimson-Roman.otf T1--Crimson--Roman
...
otftotfm: warning: not enough room in encoding, ignoring 8 glyphs
otftotfm: (This encoding doesn’t have room for all the glyphs used by the
otftotfm: font, so these have been left out:
otftotfm: T_h f_f_b f_f_h f_f_j f_f_k f_h f_j f_k.
otftotfm: To select specific glyphs, add them to the input encoding.)
...
I know that pdfTeX limits the number of glyphs in a given font to 256, and that the purpose of the font encoding is to determine the character to use in each of the 256 positions. But I would like to use the ligatures that otftotfm
left out. How can I include these additional ligatures in the font without any side effects? If this is not possible, which glyphs are safe to move to another font without affecting things like hyphenation? How can I accomplish this?
If I want to include old-style numerals and other symbols (e.g. Cyrillic alphabet), do I have to create a separate font for this purpose?
Why is there an 8-bit, 256 glyph limit for a given font in pdfTeX? This limit seems silly and totally arbitrary --- why does this limitation still exist?