🚀 go-pugleaf

The respondent asks about all the different font files, what they are for, and
what components use them. I'll give a sketch, glossing over (and possibly
misrepresenting a bit) some details, to get you started easily.

TeX and LaTeX care only about .tfm files. For each font foo, there should be a
foo.tfm file available via the appropriate search path. Such fonts can be
scaled to different sizes, but sometimes different sizes of the same type face
are actually redesigned to look better, and result in separate .tfm files. See
something like lfonts.tex to get an idea of how fonts are set up (kind of
hairy, but you get used to it after a while).

The .pk files are for dvi drivers, for previewing and printing. They are
packed rasters. The .pxl files are essentially equivalent, but more bulky and
an older form generally now avoided. The .fli font libraries are collections
of .pk (and maybe .pxl?) files, packed together to save space on disk (most
operating systems allocate in whole blocks, and lots of .pk files means lots
of partial blocks wasted, which the .fli files avoid). They are kind of like
archives or zip files, only specialized to TeX fonts.

If you get into PostScript hacking with dvips, then you will see .vf files,
which describe how a TeX version of a PostScript font, e.g., ptmr, should be
mapped into the raw PostScript font rptmr. For more information on this, and
the config.ps file, the psfonts.map file, etc., read the documentation on
dvips (which is a great program, by the way). there are related tools to build
.tfm files from PostScript font metric files (.afm = Adobe font metric).

METAFONT is a tool for constructing .tfm and .pk or .pxl files from a more
"geometric" description of a font. Given the description, a desired size, and
the raster resolution (e.g., 300 dots per inch (dpi)), and related guidance,
mf creates the stuff TeX needs. I don't use mf myself much, relying on
pre-built stuff available on the net, but I believe .gf files are the
"geometric" descriptions mentioned above.

Because fonts can be done at different resolutions, you may end up with more
.pk files around than you'd first think. Note also that scaling can be (and
often is) done by preparing the same font for a different raster size. For
example, to get a 12 point font for a 300 dpi engine, you can generate for a
360 dpi engine and use the result on the 300 dpi engine. It will be bigger in
the ratio 360/300 = 12/10.

Hope this helps ....
--

		J. Eliot B. Moss, Associate Professor
		Department of Computer Science
		Lederle Graduate Research Center
		University of Massachusetts
		Amherst, MA  01003
		(413) 545-4206, 545-1249 (fax); Moss@cs.umass.edu