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Date: Sun 13-Oct-1991 13:23:33 From: jeffo@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson) Subject: Why doesn't buildafmdir make the afm/? I just grabbed the free fonts from the purdue site and installed them. When it ran buildafmdir on the dir where I installed the fonts, it didn't put the new fonts' .afm files in the afm/. I temporarily moved the afm/ and all dot-files to make buildafmdir recreate them from the font info. It made enough so that I can preview the fonts (in the standard font panel) and use them in documents, but am I going to run into any problems without the afm/? Will printing be a problem later on? Can I just delete all the .afm files from the fonts I installed? What is their purpose? One last thing, I got an error - "buildafmdir: old and new versions of <fontname>.afm found" where <fontname> is the fonts that came with the NeXT. Is this a problem? I know this seems like a lot of questions, but they do seem to be all related. Thanks.
Date: Sun 13-Oct-1991 19:34:30 From: davis@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Robert E Davis) Subject: Re: Why doesn't buildafmdir make the afm/? In article <1991Oct13.132333.25854@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> jeffo@uiuc.edu writes: >I just grabbed the free fonts from the purdue site and installed >them. When it ran buildafmdir on the dir where I installed the >fonts, it didn't put the new fonts' .afm files in the afm/. What do you mean by "the afm/" ? In NeXTstep 2.x, the new font arrangement is to have a single directory for a font... the name of the directory is the name of the font plus a .font extension. Inside each font directory is all files necessary to describe the font -- including the .afm file. This arrangement is different from 1.0, which had a directory for all the .afm files, a directory for all the bitmaps, etc. /NextLibrary/Fonts in 2.x is arranged both ways: it has the new .font directories and the old 1.0 afm, bitmap, outline, etc. directories, for backward compatibility. I assume these 1.0 directories will be gone in the next release. The buildafmdir command just puts an index and font list in the directory that contains the .font directories. I am assuming you have 2.x. Robert
Date: Sun 14-Oct-1991 08:05:49 From: gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) Subject: Re: Why doesn't buildafmdir make the afm/? jeffo@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson) writes: > I just grabbed the free fonts from the purdue site and installed > them. When it ran buildafmdir on the dir where I installed the > fonts, it didn't put the new fonts' .afm files in the afm/. As I understand it (having wrestled with some font stuff last week), version 1.x of Next used separate directories for the different files associated with a font. The "afm" directory is one of these. Now in version 2.x of the system software there is a single directory for each font. It ends with a ".font" suffix. In the browser you'll see that directory as if it was a file, but it's really a directory of other files. Inside that directory is the .afm information for a font. So, the afm directory is no longer necessary. At least I haven't experienced any problems yet even though I got rid of the afm, bitmap, and outline directories in my /LocalLibrary/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts directories. > One last thing, I got an error - "buildafmdir: old and new versions > of <fontname>.afm found" where <fontname> is the fonts that came with > the NeXT. Is this a problem? This error hit me too. Some companies setup their fonts in both the old & new ways. They have the real font information in directories with a ".font" suffix, and then they have files in the "afm" directory. The files in the afm directory are just links back to the afm information in the ".font" directory for each font. When you run buildafmdir it sees both versions of the fonts. Perhaps there's some way to run it without getting that warning message, but in my case I just deleted the afm directory. Also note that I installed my fonts in ~/Library/Fonts (for the commercial ones I bought) and /LocalLibrary/Fonts (for the free ones). It sounds like you installed the fonts you got in /NextLibrary/Fonts. It might be better to leave that directory alone, and store any fonts that you are adding in the other two directories. That way you don't have to worry about anything that Next does with /NextLibrary/Fonts as new releases come out. Note that I'm by no means a font expert. I know a lot more about fonts than I did a week ago, but then that's not saying much...
Date: Sun 16-Oct-1991 01:56:08 From: gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) Subject: Re: Why doesn't buildafmdir make the afm/? gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) (that's me...) writes: > So, the afm directory is no longer necessary. At least I haven't > experienced any problems yet even though I got rid of the afm, bitmap, and > outline directories in my /LocalLibrary/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts > directories. For the curious, it seems that the reason that the old setup (with the afm, bitmap, and outline directories) is still there for the benefit of a few programs which referenced the files directly instead of going thru the font panel object. Things like Wingz and earlier versions of some other programs (such as FrameMaker). I don't have either Wingz or the old (or new...) version of FrameMaker, so I have no way of checking that out. In any case, those afm, bitmap, and outline directories are just links to the real files so they don't take up any significant amount of room. Other than the error messages you see when running buildafmdir they shouldn't do any harm.
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