FontForum - TeX

1 TUGboat, Volume 24 (2003), No. 2183 FontForumThere is no end: Omega and ZapfinoWilliam F. AdamsAbstractThe future of type is OpenType (Adobe and Mi-crosoft s successor to Apple s Royal font technol-ogy which was licensed to Microsoft as TrueType),Unicode, and other extensions of TrueType and theType 1 font format such asATSUI(Apple Typo-graphic System for Unicode Information). WhileTEX has been extended to support other new for-mats and standards such , support for thenew font formats has been limited at , for Unicode in TEX, we have Omega,which coupled with the other strengths of TEX, canbe sufficient to take advantage of new technologieseven without explicit support, by using the proper(or improper) paper will be an explanation and explo-ration of this, looking at a specific font and format( version of Zapfino)

2 , ar-guably very nearly a worst-case scenario, and howit can be dissassembled into individual glyphs andseamlessly stitched back together to automaticallyinsert ligatures and swash and variant forms usingASCII markup in an otherwise which can then be used in a prepress ready s MacOS Xderives from NeXTstep, by wayofOPENSTEP, with a grafting of Apple Macintoshuser interface concepts. In terms of font support, ithandles Mac Resource/Suitcase fonts (both Type 1and TrueType) andPCTrueType fonts, but losessupport for s QuickDraw/GXis added as well, now knownasATSUI(Apple Typographic System for UnicodeInformation) or asAAT(Apple Advanced Typogra-phy) depending on the specific context or Xprovides many of its system fontsin the , which, while a straight-forward storing of a Mac-style TrueType font in thefile proper (the datafork in Mac parlance)

3 Instead ofthe resource fork as was done with MacOS 9andearlier, is not equivalent to aPCformat TrueTypefont stored in Although there are nowprograms which can open and parse fonts stored (Pfaedit1is a notable example), my inter-1 Renamed toFontForge, this wonderful program is avail-able of Apple s licensing agreement leads me tobelieve that any such parsing or conversion wouldnot be allowed by that , having purchased MacOS Xand its$10,000 worth of fonts, one cannot help but wishto use them. Although Zapfino works well in Co-coa programs in MacOS Xsuch ,its special features such as ligatures are enabled byAATwhich is unfortunately not supported by themore traditional Carbon Macintosh applicationsin which class all mainstream graphic design appli-cations are, at this is unfortunatelyquite limiting: either one must limit oneself to Co-coa applications, or in applications such as InDesign,make use of its Glyph palette to insert alternates andligatures by repetitive pointing-and-clicking.

4 Sincethere is no TEX variant which can access systemfonts on MacOS Xas of this writing,3one mustdevelop a work-around which allows one to accessarbitrary fonts from within TEX and to simulate thesophisticated typesetting capabilities of OpenTypeor Apple Advanced large character sets of fonts such as Ap-ple Chancery or Zapfino make accessing charactersin 8-bit blocks untenable, so Omega is an obviouschoice. This serves two purposes: first, it makes thetypeface, Zapfino by Prof. Hermann Zapf availablefor use in TEX by way of Omega; second, it providesan encoding scheme and mechanism to access arbi-trary ligatures and alternates which may be of usefor other had its origins in Prof.

5 Zapf s 1944 sketch-book, when he was a mapping officer during WorldWarII. A previous attempt to render those letter-forms as type, Virtuosa Script for D. Stempel, hadbeen rather compromised by the limitations of hotmetal matrices, especially the swash letters. Thisdesign was revived when David Siegel in 1993, afterworking on the Euler project with Prof. Zapf, andafter graduating approached him about a chaoticcalligraphic typeface based upon an example donefor the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago. Re-membering the page from his sketchbook, Prof. Zapfsaw the chance for a design without compromises2 Since then, the open source drawing program Cenon hasbeen released for MacOS Xas well asOPENSTEP It is available Thereare also SoftMagic s Project-M , Stone Design s Create orPurgatory Design s Intaglio, but none are widely Kew has since releasedXeTeX, a successor tohis TEX/GXprogram for Apple s QuickDraw/GX, which runson MacOS X, thus makingAATfonts accessible.

6 It is avail-able , Volume 24 (2003), No. 2due to the advantages afforded by digital type was done by Gino Lee, but pro-duction halted due to personal problems, and lan-guished until Prof. Zapf showed the design to Lino-type. It was then rendered as a traditional, multiplealphabet typeface then begs the question of how does one install afont into a program (system) which doesn t have di-rect support for that font format or its capabilities?The solution is quite obvious in retrospect: considerwhat the system does support (PostScript by way ofdvipsand the\specialmechanism) and where thatintersects with the capabilities of systems which canuse the font to its fullest (Encapsulated PostScriptFile graphics).

7 The solution then is to load all ofthe characters of a font into a file so that they maythen each be output as , stitchsaid files together as a virtual font and then rely ondvipsto put everything back , however, has so many characters(1,417 in the version bundled with MacOS X Jaguar 4) that Omega, with its support for Uni-code which provides for large character sets, isneeded. Omega also affords the Omega Transla-tion Process (OTP), which is far more efficient atenabling long ligatures than the standard TEX orPostScript mechanisms. Fortunately,odvipssup-ports the font metric information is probablynot protectable, there is no reasonable method atpresent to access the data stored within the Zapfinofont file which wouldn t run afoul of Apple s licenseforbidding decompilation or other modification.

8 Pre-sumably, however, a program using the nsText ob-ject could access such data on a per character basisand write that out in a useful format. In lieu ofsuch, a copy of provided by VolkerSchaa (he had received a copy of the original Lino-type ZapfinoCD-ROMfrom Prof. Zapf as a gift)was used as a beginning point. These files were con-verted into usingafm2tfmandthence usingtftopl. The file for the fontZapfino One served as the basis ,the base font file. The utilityovp2ovfwas thenused to createovfandofmfiles for Omega to files are stored in (as appropriate)4 Since this writing, Linotype has released Zapfino Ex-tra OpenType which provides even more characters, mostnotably small caps, and Forte which provides five ad-ditional weights.

9 The technique here should also workwith this new version. More information on ZapfinoExtra is available ~/Library/texmf/fonts/ovp/apple/zapfino~ /Library/texmf/fonts/ovf/apple/zapfino~/ Library/texmf/fonts/ofm/apple/zapfinoBef ore testing could begin, it was necessary tohave the letterforms themselves accessible to was done by using Adobe InDesign to typesetan Adobe Tagged Text file which enumerated all ofthe characters in Zapfino. First, a single characterwas set in the font Zapfino in InDesign at 72 pointssize with 96 points leading and then exported (File|Export.., select Adobe InDesign Tagged Text in theFormats:pop-up), yielding a file with the fol-lowing line needed for our purposes:<cTypeface:> <cSize:> <cLeading:> <cFont:> <cHang:> <pHyphenationLadderLimit:> <pHyphenation:> <pHyphenationZone:> <pTabRuler:> <ParaStyle:> <pHyphenationLadderLimit:0> <pHyphenation:0> < > < \,Left\.

10 \,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\; \,Left\,.\,0\,\;> <cTypeface:Regular> < > < > <cFont:Zapfino> <cHang:Baseline>A<0xFFFD> <cTypeface:> <cSize:> <cLeading:> <cFont:> <cHang:> <cSpecialGlyph:> <cTypeface:Regular> < > < > <cFont:Zapfino> <cHang:Baseline> <cNextXChars:Page>(The exported character was A there is someadditional text above and below said line, but itneed merely be preserved in its entirety for lateruse.) After a little study and experimentation,it was found that the placed character could bereplaced with<cSpecialGlyph:####>where####was a number ranging from 1 (the first character, A shown in the Unicode glyph palette in in MacOS X) to 1417 (the last character, the open Ap-ple symbol), so an Excel file was created with 1,417rows and three columns.