Archive for December, 2011

Leveraging AFDKO Tools to Convert Name-keyed OpenType Fonts to CID-keyed — Part 1

The easiest method for representing an arbitrary name-keyed OpenType font as a CID-keyed one is to specify the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS (/Registry, /Ordering, and /Supplement, referring to the three elements of the /CIDSystemInfo dictionary that is present in CIDFont resource headers), and in my experience, the easiest path to conversion is to leverage specific AFDKO tools, such as tx, mergeFonts, stemHist, autohint, and makeotf. As you should discover after reading this article, the conversion process is relatively straight-forward and simple.

The first part in this series will focus on the basic conversion process, from name-keyed to CID-keyed, ignoring any OpenType features that were present in the original name-keyed OpenType font, and also not taking advantage of multiple FDArray elements (aka, hint dictionaries) that are possible in CID-keyed fonts. Subsequent parts in this series will cover those topics.
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