Directory fonts/ps-type1/pandora

Type 1 versions of the Pandora fonts
Patrick TJ McPhee 11 February 2004


From the README file of the original distribution:


           The intent of the Pandora project is to test the ideas and
        power of Metafont in a design context. The starting point
        came from broad ideas about type, rather than trying to
        create a specific predetermined typeface. 

It's an interesting typeface which the designer describes as beta
quality. Some of the spacing seems a bit off and a few characters
(capital M comes to mind) don't fit in well, but it seems reasonable if
you want an occasional break from your steady diet of CM, Times, and
Palatino. One really odd thing is that the bold sets narrower than the
roman, and the roman sets narrower than the italic.

In the mad orgy of textraced fonts which appeared on CTAN in the first
few years of the 21st century, somehow Pandora was overlooked. As a
recent posting to comp.text.tex indicates that someone is using the
font, and as I wanted to try autotracing, I've created type 1 versions
of the seven fonts for which Billawala provided driver files.

The fonts are intendended as drop-in replacements for the PK files, for
use with dvips, dvipdfm, pdftex, etc. You should use the tfm files
generated by metafont (I have provided afm files, but not tested them).
The encoding is exactly the same as the PK files, and I have not
provided any additional characters. I've tried them with all of the
above-listed applications and with xdvi, and the glyphs look about the
same as the PK-format glyphs, and the right edges form a straight line,
so I suppose the widths are OK. There is no warranty here at all.

To install the fonts, copy the files from the type1 directory to
somewhere under the fonts/type1 directory of your TeX tree (for instance
texmf-local/fonts/type1/public/pandora, and copy the files from the afm
directory to a corresponding directory under fonts/afm (e.g.,
texmf-local/fonts/afm/public/pandora), then update your file database.
This will suffice for dvipdfm and xdvi. pdftex and dvips require that
dvips/pandora.map be appended to dvips/config/pdftex.map or
dvips/config/psfonts.map, respectively.

Pandora was designed by Neenie Billawala. The metafont sources are
copyright 1989, N N Billawala. I have claimed copyright of the the type
1 versions, however they are distributed under the same terms as the
original. This distribution is copyright 2004 Patrick TJ McPhee.

The fonts are licensed for free for all educational and non-profit use,
and for free redistribution under the same provisions as hold for the
original Pandora distribution.

If you have a problem with the pfb fonts themselves, send me a note at
ptjm@interlog.com. For problems using the fonts with TeX (i.e., with the
tfms), try comp.text.tex.

My methods:

I created these fonts using pfaedit (http://pfaedit.sf.net), using the
patched autotrace distributed with textrace (but the autotrace that
you can link to from the pfaedit home page is probably as good,
or maybe better). My actual goal was to figure out how to run autotrace
from inside pfaedit. It turns out to be pretty simple:

 1. generate a proof-mode version of the font
    mf '\mode:=smoke; input pnb10;'

 2. load the resulting gf file into pfaedit
    pfaedit pnb10.2602gf

 3. Press Ctrl-A to select all the characters

 4. Select autotrace frmo the `element' menu, or press Ctrl-Shift-T

 5. Fill in the font name using `element/font info'

 6. Bring up 'element/character info' for each character, fill in the name
    and unicode position for each character

 7. Make sure autohinting is turned on and generate the font.

Number 6 was the most work, but it turns out that pfaedit uses the gf
special that precedes each character as the default name value, so I
changed all the specials to the appropriate postscript names (i.e., from
`The Letter A' to `A', or from `The Uppercase Greek Letter Delta' to
`Delta') in the metafont sources and started over. I still had to press
`set from name' and `next' for each character, but I'm sure that part
can be scripted.

Due to errors in the font definitions, I had to fix up the counters
on the e of either ae or oe on all the fonts except pnr10 and pntt9.
On the fonts where oe was bad, I copied the counter from ae, and vice-versa.
Apart from that, I've done nothing to the change the glyphs.

On the whole, I think the results are pretty good for not too much work,
so cheers to Neenie Billawala, George Williams (pfaedit), Martin Weber
(autotrace), and Don Knuth (metafont)