Given a family of font files (in either .ttf or .otf format), autoinst will create several LaTeX font families:
Of course, if the font doesn't contain oldstyle figures, small caps etc., the corresponding shapes or families are not created; furthermore, the creation of most families and shapes can be controlled by command-line options (see below).
The generated font families are named <FontFamily>-<Suffix>, where <Suffix> is one of
The generated fonts are named <FontFile>-<suffix>-<shape>-<enc>,
where <FontFile> is the name of the OpenType file, <suffix>
is the same as above (but in lowercase), <shape> is either empty,
`sc', `swash' or `titling', and <enc> is the encoding.
A typical name in this scheme is MinionPro-Regular-osf-sc-ly1.
On the choice of text encoding
By default, all text families use the LY1 encoding. This has been chosen over T1 (Cork) because many OpenType fonts contain additional ligatures such as fj and Th, and LY1 has a number of empty slots to accommodate these.
A different encoding can be selected using the --encoding
command line option (see below).
Using the fonts with LaTeX
autoinst generates a style file for using the font in LaTeX documents, named `<FontFamily>.sty'. This style file also takes care of loading the fontenc and textcomp packages, if necessary. To use the font, simply put "\usepackage{MinionPro}" (or whatever the font is called) in the preamble of your document.
This style file defines a number of options:
This option is only available when the xkeyval package is found in your TeX installation.
The style file will also try to load the fontaxes package (part of the MinionPro for LaTeX project), which gives easy access to various font shapes and styles. This package can be downloaded from the project's homepage (http://developer.berlios.de/projects/minionpro) or directly through the CVS web interface (http://cvs.berlios.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/minionpro/MinionPro/tex/), and is also available from CTAN as part of the archive base-v2.zip (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/minionpro/base-v2.zip).
Using the machinery set up by fontaxes, the generated style file also defines a few commands (which take the text to be typeset as argument) and declarations (which don't take arguments, but affect all text up to the end of the current group) of its own:
DECLARATION COMMAND SHORT FORM OF COMMAND \tlshape \texttitling \texttl \sufigures \textsuperior \textsu \infigures \textinferior \textin
In addition, the "\swshape" and "\textsw" commands are redefined to place swash on the secondary shape axis (fontaxes places it on the primary shape axis); this allows the use of `upright swash'. Just saying "\swshape" will still give normal (italic) swash, but "\swshape\upshape" results in upright swash.
Note that there is no separate command for accessing the italic titling shape; but these commands behave properly when nested, so "\tlshape\itshape" gives italic titling. There are also no commands for accessing the numerator and denominator fonts; these can be selected using fontaxes' low-level commands, e.g., "\fontfigurestyle{numerator}\selectfont".
The style file also provides a command "\ornament{<number>}", where "<number>" is a number from 0 to the total number of ornaments minus one. Ornaments are always typeset using the current family, series and shape. A list of all ornaments in a font can be created by running LaTeX on the file nfssfont.tex (part of a standard LaTeX installation) and specifying the ornament font (e.g., MinionPro-Regular-orn-u).
This whole machinery builds on fontaxes; if that package cannot be found,
the style file doesn't provide high-level access to the more `exotic'
font shapes and styles. In that case, you're limited to using the lower-level
commands from standard NFSS, or even plain TeX's "\font" primitive
(and it's called `primitive' for a reason!)
Using multiple font families in one document
If you want to use several font families in one document, make sure
all fonts were installed using the same version of autoinst.
autoinst has seen some non-backward-compatible changes in the past,
and .sty and .fd files that were generated by different versions
of autoinst may not be able to coexist peacefully.
NFSS codes
In NFSS, weight and width are concatenated into a single `series' attribute. (Note: versions of autoinst before 2007-07-27 erroneously formed the series as `width plus weight' instead of the reverse.) autoinst maps widths, weights and shapes to NFSS codes using the following tables. These are based on the tables in Lehman's Font Installation Guide, but some changes had to be made to avoid name clashes for font families with many different widths and weights (such as Helvetica Neue).
WEIGHT WIDTH Thin t Ultra Condensed uc Ultra Light ul Extra Condensed ec Extra Light el Condensed c Light l Semicondensed sc Book [1] Regular [1] Regular [1] Semiextended sx Medium mb Extended x Demibold db Semibold sb Bold b Extra Bold eb SHAPES Black a Extra Black ea Roman n Heavy h Italic it Ultra ub Oblique it [2] Ultra Bold ub RomanI n [3] Ultra Black ua RomanII it [3]
A note for MikTeX users
Calling otftotfm with the --automatic option (as autoinst does by default) requires a TeX-installation that uses the kpathsea library; with TeX-installations that implement their own directory searching (such as MiKTeX) otftotfm might complain that it cannot find a writable texmf directory and leave all generated tfm, vf, enc and map files in the current working directory. In that case, you need to move these to their correct destinations. You also need to tell the dvi-driver (dvips, dvipdfm, pdfTeX etc.) about the new font map files; this usually means editing some configuration file.
Furthermore, some OpenType fonts lead to pl and vpl files that are too big for MiKTeX's pltotf and vptovf; the versions that come with TeXLive (http://tug.org/ftp/texlive/Contents/live/bin/win32/) don't have this problem.
Multiple text encodings can be specified as well: " --encoding=OT1,T1,LY1". The encodings are passed to fontenc in the order specified, so the last one will be the default text encoding.
Perl is usually pre-installed on Linux and Unix systems; for Windows, good (and free) Perl implementations are Strawberry Perl (http://strawberryperl.com) and ActivePerl (available from http://www.activestate.com);
John Owens' otfinst (http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/code/otfinst/; also available from CTAN) is another wrapper around otftotfm, and may work for you when autoinst doesn't.
Ready-made support files for MinionPro, providing more options and features than autoinst ever will (including math), are available from http://developer.berlios.de/projects/minionpro/.
XeTeX (http://scripts.sil.org/xetex) is a TeX extension that can use any font installed in the operating system (including both flavours of OpenType fonts) without additional support files. It also isn't hindered by standard TeX's limitation to 8-bit fonts, so it is especially well suited to fonts with many ligatures and alternate glyphs, such as Bickham, Poetica and Zapfino.
When sending a bug report, please give as much relevant information as possible; this usually includes (but may not be limited to) the output from running autoinst with the --verbose option. Please make sure that this output includes all error messages (if any); this can be done using the command
autoinst (... all options and files ...) >autoinst.log 2>&1
A copy of the GNU General Public License is included with the fontools collection; see the file GPLv2.txt.