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I have a proprietary handwriting font in OTF format (which I unfortunately cannot share) and want to convert it for the use with PDFlatex. However to nicely merge all characters, according to the font documentation, one needs to activate ligatures, which are used to move the characters together. When using autoinst and otftotfm I only get results where each character is seperate from the next with PDFlatex and the conversion takes multiple hours. I alternatively used LUAlatex to directly load the font and here the correct behaviour works out of the box. My suspicion is, that because technically each character uses mutliple ligatures with the next character, that there are just too many characters for the limited encodings. And additionally LaTeX does not directly apply ligatures to all possible characters (because it doesn't know about a ligature between E and w for example).

  1. Is my suspicion correct?
  2. Is there a way around this dilemma to use the handwriting OTF font with PDFlatex?
  3. Do I manually have to add all ligatures with --ligkern?

I understand, that it might be hard to get, what the actual problem is, if that is the case, please let me know in the comments and I will provide an example with one of the available calligraphic fonts.

TobiBS
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  • Yes, you would have to add the ligaturing information manually, but then the actual ligature also needs to be included in the font, requiring reencoding. And the problem is that Type1 fonts only offer 256 slots. So even if you start from OT1 with its 128 empty slots, this might not be sufficient for your needs, while on the other hand all the accented letters, for example, would be missing. – Robert Mar 31 '20 at 17:59
  • That's true, except for German diacritics (3 lower case, 3 upper case) and the ß I won't have any other special characters. Nevertheless the glyph list given by otfinfo -g has 1060 glyphs. For the lowercase z e.g. it shows: z z.LhRlm z.LhRm z.LhRn z.LlRl z.LlRn z.LmRl z.LmRlm z.LmRm z.LmRn z.LnRl z.LnRlm Which of those do I need and how shall I write the --ligkern commands for them? – TobiBS Apr 05 '20 at 10:24
  • To find out the ligaturing rules, you'd probably have to inspect the font in a font editor (eg. fontforge). As for the ligkern commands, see man otftotfm. But again, I doubt whether this is really worth the effort, as you would lose approx. 800 of the 900 ligatures, due to the restrictions of pdftex. – Robert Apr 11 '20 at 23:30
  • I think you are right @Robert, looking at https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/calligraphicalfonts.html all fonts that have a handwriting style which needs additional ligatures are only available as TTF or OTF. Do you want to make this an answer, so I can accept it? – TobiBS Apr 14 '20 at 16:00

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