Ubuntu Manpage: autoinst - wrapper around the LCDF TypeTools, for installing and using OpenType fonts in LaTeX.

Provided by: texlive-font-utils_2024.20250309-2_all

NAME

       autoinst - wrapper around the LCDF TypeTools, for installing and using OpenType fonts in LaTeX.

SYNOPSIS

       autoinst -help

       autoinst [options] font(s)

DESCRIPTION

Eddie Kohler's LCDF TypeTools are superb tools for installing OpenType fonts in LaTeX, but they can be
hard to use: they need many, often long, command lines and don't generate the fd and sty files LaTeX
needs. autoinst simplifies the use of the TypeTools for font installation by generating and executing
all commands for otftotfm, and by creating and installing all necessary fd and sty files.

Given a family of font files (in otf or ttf format), autoinst will create several LaTeX font families:

- Four text families (with lining and oldstyle digits, each in both tabular and proportional
variants), all with the following shapes:

n Roman (i.e., upright) text

it, sl Italic and slanted (sometimes called oblique) text

sc Small caps

scit, scsl
Italic and slanted small caps

sw Swash

nw "Upright swash"

- For each T1-encoded text family: a family of TS1-encoded symbol fonts, in roman, italic and slanted
shapes.

- Families with superiors, inferiors, numerators and denominators, in roman, italic and slanted
shapes.

- Families with "Titling" characters; these "... replace the default glyphs with corresponding forms
designed specifically for titling. These may be all-capital and/or larger on the body, and adjusted
for viewing at larger sizes" (according to the OpenType Specification).

- An ornament family; also in roman, italic and slanted shapes.

Of course, if your fonts don't contain italics, oldstyle digits, small caps etc., the corresponding
shapes and families are not created. In addition, the creation of most families and shapes can be
controlled by the user (see "COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS" below).

These families use the FontPro project's naming scheme: <FontFamily>-<Suffix>, where <Suffix> is:

LF proportional (i.e., figures have varying widths) lining figures

TLF tabular (i.e., all figures have the same width) lining figures

OsF proportional oldstyle figures

TOsF tabular oldstyle figures

Sup superior characters (note that most fonts have only an incomplete set of superior characters:
digits, some punctuation and the letters abdeilmnorst; normal forms are used for other
characters)

Inf inferior characters; usually only digits and some punctuation, normal forms for other characters

Titl Titling characters; see above

Orn ornaments

Numr, Dnom
numerators and denominators

The individual fonts are named <FontName>-<suffix>-<shape>-<enc>, where <suffix> is the same as above
(but in lowercase), <shape> is either empty, "sc" or "swash", and <enc> is the encoding (also in
lowercase). A typical name in this scheme would be FiraSans-Light-osf-sc-ly1.

Using the fonts in your LaTeX documents
autoinst generates a style file for using the fonts in LaTeX documents, named <FontFamily>.sty. This
style file also loads the fontenc and textcomp packages, if necessary. To use the fonts, add the command
"\usepackage{<FontFamily>}" to the preamble of your document.

This style file has a few options:

"mainfont"
Redefine "\familydefault" to make this font the main font for the document. This is a no-op if the
font is installed as a serif font; but if the font is installed as a sanserif or typewriter font,
this option saves you from having to redefine "\familydefault" yourself.

"lining", "oldstyle", "tabular", "proportional"
Choose which figure style to use. The defaults are "oldstyle" and "proportional" (if available).

"scale=<factor>", "scale=MatchLowercase"
Scale the font by <factor>; as an example, "\usepackage[scale=1.05]{<FontFamily>}" will increase the
font's size by 5%. The special value "MatchLowercase" may be used to scale the font so that its
x-height matches that of the current main font (which is usually Computer Modern Roman, unless you
have loaded another font package before this one). The word "scale" may also be spelled as "scaled".

"medium", "book", "text", "normal", "regular"
Select the weight that LaTeX will use as the "regular" weight.

"heavy", "black", "extrabold", "demibold", "semibold", "bold"
Select the weight that LaTeX will use as the "bold" weight.

The last two groups of options will only work if you have the mweights package installed. The default
here is not to change LaTeX's default, i.e. use the "m" and "b" weights.

The style file will also try to load the fontaxes package (on CTAN), which gives easy access to various
font shapes and styles. Using the machinery set up by fontaxes, the generated style file defines a
number of 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) to access titling, superior and
inferior characters:

DECLARATION COMMAND SHORT FORM OF COMMAND

\tlshape \texttitling \texttl
\supfigures \textsuperior \textsup, \textsu
\inffigures \textinferior \textinf, \textin

In addition, the existing "\swshape" and "\textsw" commands are redefined to place swash on fontaxes'
secondary shape axis (fontaxes places it on the primary shape axis) to make them behave properly when
nested, so that "\swshape\upshape" will give upright swash.

Finally, the style file redefines Latex's "\textsuperscript" and "\textsubscript" commands to use the
fonts' superior and inferior figures, and modifies Latex's footnote mechanism to use "\textsuperscript"
instead of reduced-size numerals from the regular text font. The old versions of these commands are
still available as "\textsuperscript*" and "\textsubscript*".

There are no commands for accessing the numerator and denominator fonts; these can be selected using
fontaxes' standard commands, e.g., "\fontfigurestyle{numerator}\selectfont".

Once again: all these commands are only generated for existing shapes and number styles; no commands are
generated for shapes and styles that are missing from your fonts. Note that all these commands are built
on top of fontaxes; if that package cannot be found, you're limited to using lower-level commands from
standard NFSS ("\fontfamily", "\fontseries", "\fontshape" etc.).

By default, autoinst generates text fonts with OT1, LY1 and T1 encodings, and the generated style files
use T1 as the default text encoding. Other encodings can be chosen using the -encoding option (see
"COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS" below).

Maths
This is an experimental feature; USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! Test the results thoroughly before using them in
real documents, and be warned that future versions of autoinst may introduce incompatible changes.

The -math option tells autoinst to generate basic math fonts. When enabled, the generated style file
defines a few extra options to access these math fonts:

"math"
Use these fonts for the maths in your document.

"mathlining", "matholdstyle", "mathtabular", "mathproportional"
Choose which figure style and alignment to use in maths. The defaults are "mathlining" and
"mathtabular".

"mathcal"
Use the swash characters from these fonts as the "\mathcal" alphabet. (This option will only exist
if your fonts actually contain both swash characters and a "swsh" feature to access them).

"nomathgreek"
Don't redeclare greek letters in math.

"math-style=<style>"
Choose the "math style" to use. With "math-style=ISO", all latin and greek letters in math are
italic; with "math-style=TeX" (the default), uppercase greek is upright; with "math-style=french",
all greek as well as uppercase latin is upright; and with "math-style=upright" all letters are
upright.

The style file also defines commands "\up..." and "\it..." to access upright and italic greek characters
regardless of the chosen math style: "\upGamma", "\upalpha", "\itDelta", "\itbeta" etc.

Note that this "math" option only affects digits, latin and greek letters, plus a few basic punctuation
characters; all other mathematical symbols, operators, delimiters etc. are left as they were before. If
you don't want to use TeX's default versions of those symbols, load another math package (such as
mathdesign or newtxmath) before loading the autoinst-generated style file.

Finally, note that autoinst doesn't check if your fonts actually contains all of the required characters;
it just assumes that they do and sets up the style file accordingly. Even if your fonts do contain
greek, characters such as "\varepsilon" may be missing. You may also find that some glyphs are present
in your fonts, but don't work well in equations or don't match other symbols; edit the generated style
file to remove the declarations of these offending characters. Once again: test the results before using
them! If the characters themselves are fine but spaced too tightly, you may try increasing the side
bearings in math fonts with the -mathspacing option (see below), e.g. "-mathspacing=50".

NFSS codes
LaTeX's New Font Selection System (NFSS) identifies fonts by a combination of family, series (the
concatenation of weight and width), shape and size. autoinst parses the font's metadata to determine
these parameters. When this fails (usually because the font family contains uncommon weights, widths or
shapes), autoinst ends up with multiple fonts having the same values for these font parameters; such
fonts cannot be used in NFSS, since there's no way distinguish them. When autoinst detects such a
situation, it will print an error message and abort. If that happens, either rerun autoinst on a smaller
set of fonts, or add the missing widths, weights and shapes to the tables @WIDTH, @WEIGHT and %SHAPE in
the source code. Please also send a bug report (see AUTHOR below).

The mapping of shapes to NFSS codes is done using the following table:

SHAPE CODE
-------------------------------- ----
Roman, Upright n
Italic it
Oblique, Slant(ed), Incline(d) sl

(Exception: Adobe Silentium Pro contains two Roman shapes; we map the first of these to "n", for the
second one we (ab)use the "it" code as this family doesn't contain an Italic shape.)

For weights and widths, autoinst tries to the standard NFSS codes (ul, el, l, sl, m, sb, b, eb and ub for
weights; uc, ec, c, sc, m, sx, x, ex and ux for widths) as much as possible. Of course, not all 81
combinations of these NFSS weights and widths will map to existing fonts; and conversely it may not be
possible to assign every existing font a unique code in a sane way (especially for the weights, some font
families offer more variants than NFSS's codes can handle; e.g., Fira Sans contains fifteen different
weights!). Therefore every font is also assigned a "series" name that is the concatenation of its weight
and width, after expanding any abbreviations and converting to lowercase. A font of "Cond" width and
"Ultra" weight will then be known as "ultrablackcondensed".

The exact mapping between fonts and NFSS codes can be found in the generated fd files and in the log file
(you may want to run autoinst with the -dryrun option to check the chosen mapping beforehand). The
-nfssweight and -nfsswidth command-line options can be used to finetune the mapping between NFSS codes
and fonts.

To access specific weights or widths, one can always use the "\fontseries" command with the full series
name (i.e., "\fontseries{demibold}\selectfont").

Ornaments
Ornament fonts are regular LY1-encoded fonts, with a number of "regular" characters replaced by ornament
glyphs. The OpenType specification says that fonts should only put their ornaments in place of the
lowercase ASCII letters, but some fonts put them in other positions (such as those of the digits) as
well.

Ornaments can be accessed like "{\ornaments a}" and "{\ornaments\char"61}", or equivalently
"\textornaments{a}" and "\textornaments{\char"61}". To see which ornaments a font contains (and at which
positions), run LaTeX on the file nfssfont.tex (which is included in any standard LaTeX installation),
supply the name of the ornament font (i.e., "GaramondLibre-Regular-orn-u") and give the command
"\table\bye"; this will create a table of all glyphs in that font.

Note that versions of autoinst up to 20200428 handled ornaments differently, and fonts and style files
generated by those versions are not compatible with files generated by newer versions.

WARNINGS AND CAVEATS

OpenType fonts and licensing issues
Since pdfTeX cannot subset otf-flavoured OpenType fonts, otftotfm will convert such fonts to Type1 (pfb)
format. However, many fonts (at least those licensed under the SIL Open Font License) do not allow
redistributing such converted versions under their original name.

In order to try to meet such licensing requirements, autoinst provides a -t1suffix command-line option
that appends a suffix to the names (both the filename and the internal font name) of all generated Type1
fonts; see "COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS" below.

Please note that I am not a lawyer and do not guarantee that this suffix is sufficient to meet the
license's requirements. When in doubt, consult a real lawyer!

Sorry, LIGTABLE too long for me to handle
The LIGTABLE in TeX's tfm files, which contains a font's ligatures and kerning pairs, is limited to about
32,500 entries (2^15 - 256). If the number of ligatures plus kerns in a font is higher than that limit,
pltotf and vptovf will complain loudly and ignore the excess entries. This happens at least with Adobe's
Source Serif 4 and Minion 3 font families. Even when pltotf and vptovf don't warn about the LIGTABLE's
size, you may still find that pdftex crashes with a "Bad metric (TFM) file" error. The best way to
handle this situation is to use autoinst's "-extra" option to raise otftotfm's value for the "--min-kern"
parameter, which causes it to ignore small kerning pairs: "-extra='--min-kern=6.0'". Finding the correct
value for the "--min-kern" parameter may require some trial and error.

A note for MiKTeX users
Automatically installing the fonts into a suitable TEXMF tree (as autoinst tries to do by default) only
works for TeX-installations that use the kpathsea library; with TeX distributions that implement their
own directory searching, such as MiKTeX, autoinst will complain that it cannot find the kpsewhich program
and move all generated files into a subdirectory "autoinst_output/" of the current directory. If you use
such a TeX distribution, you should either move these files to their correct destinations by hand, or use
the -target option (see "COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS" below) to manually specify a TEXMF tree.

Also, some OpenType fonts contain so many kerning pairs that the resulting pl and vpl files are too big
for MiKTeX's pltotf and vptovf; the versions that come with W32TeX (http://www.w32tex.org) and TeXLive
(http://tug.org/texlive) don't seem to have this problem.

A note for MacTeX users
By default, autoinst will try to install all generated files into the $TEXMFLOCAL tree; when this
directory isn't user-writable, it will use the $TEXMFHOME tree instead. Unfortunately, MacTeX's version
of "updmap-sys" doesn't search in $TEXMFHOME, and hence MacTeX will not find the new fonts.

To remedy this, either run autoinst as root (so that it can install everything into $TEXMFLOCAL) or
manually run "updmap -user" to tell TeX about the files in $TEXMFHOME. This latter option does, however,
come with some caveats; see https://tug.org/texlive/scripts-sys-user.html.

COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS

autoinst tries hard to do The Right Thing (TM) by default, so you usually won't need these options; but
most aspects of its operation can be fine-tuned if you want to.

You may use either one or two dashes before options, and option names may be shortened to a unique prefix
(e.g., -encoding may be abbreviated to -enc or even -en, but -e is ambiguous (it may mean either
-encoding or -extra)).

General options
-help
Print a (relatively) short help text and exit.

-dryrun
Don't generate output; just parse input fonts and write the results to the log file.

-verbose
Add more details to the log file.

-version
Print autoinst's version number and exit.

Font creation options
-encoding=encoding[,encoding]
Generate the specified encoding(s) for the text fonts. Multiple encodings may be specified as a
comma-separated list (without spaces!); the default choice of encodings is "OT1,LY1,T1".

For each encoding argument, autoinst will first check if it is the filename of an encoding file, and
if found it will use that; otherwise the argument is assumed to be the name of one of the built-in
encodings. Currently autoinst comes with built-in support for the OT1, T1/TS1, LY1, T2A/B/C, T3/TS3,
T4, T5, LGR, CS, L7X and QX encodings. (These files are called fontools_ot1.enc etc. to avoid name
clashes with other packages; the fontools_ prefix may be omitted.)

-ts1/-nots1
Control the creation of TS1-encoded fonts. The default is -ts1 if the text encodings (see -encoding
above) include T1, -nots1 otherwise.

-lining/-nolining
Control the creation of fonts with lining figures. The default is -lining.

-oldstyle/-nooldstyle
Control the creation of fonts with oldstyle figures. The default is -oldstyle.

-proportional/-noproportional
Control the creation of fonts with proportional figures. The default is -proportional.

-tabular/-notabular
Control the creation of fonts with tabular figures. The default is -tabular.

-smallcaps/-nosmallcaps
Control the creation of small caps fonts. The default is -smallcaps.

-swash/-noswash
Control the creation of swash fonts. The default is -swash.

-titling/-notitling
Control the creation of titling families. The default is -titling.

-superiors/-nosuperiors
Control the creation of fonts with superior characters. The default is -superiors.

-inferiors [ = none | auto | subs | sinf | dnom ]
-noinferiors
The OpenType standard defines several kinds of digits that might be used as inferiors or subscripts:
"Subscripts" (OpenType feature "subs"), "Scientific Inferiors" ("sinf"), and "Denominators" ("dnom").
This option allows the user to determine which of these styles autoinst should use for the inferior
characters. Alternatively, the value "auto" tells autoinst to use the first value in "sinf", "subs"
or "dnom" that is supported by the font. Saying just -inferiors is equivalent to -inferiors=auto;
otherwise the default is -noinferiors.

If you specify a style of inferiors that isn't present in the font, autoinst will fall back to its
default behaviour of not creating fonts with inferiors at all; it won't try to substitute one of the
other styles.

-fractions/-nofractions
Control the creation of fonts with numerators and denominators. The default is -nofractions.

-ligatures/-noligatures
Some fonts contain glyphs for the standard f-ligatures (ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl), but don't provide a
"liga" feature to access these. This option tells autoinst to add extra "LIGKERN" rules to the
generated fonts to enable the use of these ligatures. The default is -ligatures, except for
typewriter fonts.

Specify -noligatures to disable generation of ligatures even for fonts that do contain a "liga"
feature.

-ornaments/-noornaments
Control the creation of ornament fonts. The default is -ornaments.

-serif/-sanserif/-typewriter
Install the font as a serif, sanserif or typewriter font, respectively. This changes how you access
the font in LaTeX: with "\rmfamily"/"\textrm", "\sffamily"/"\textsf" or "\ttfamily"/"\texttt".

Installing the font as a typewriter font will cause two further changes: it will - by default - turn
off the use of f-ligatures (though this can be overridden with the -ligatures option), and it will
disable hyphenation for this font. This latter effect cannot be re-enabled in autoinst; if you want
typewriter text to be hyphenated, use the hyphenat package.

If none of these options is specified, autoinst tries to guess: if the font's filename contains the
string "mono" or if the field "isFixedPitch" in the font's "post" table is True, it will select
-typewriter; else if the filename contains "sans" it will select -sanserif; otherwise it will opt for
-serif.

-math
Tells autoinst to create basic math fonts (see above).

-mathspacing=amount
Letterspace each character in the math fonts by amount units, where 1000 units equal one em. In my
opinion, many text fonts benefit from letterspacing by 50 to 100 units when used in maths; some fonts
need even more. Use your own judgement!

Output options
-t1suffix [ = SUFFIX ]
Tell autoinst to modify the font names of all generated Type1-fonts, by adding SUFFIX to the family
name. If you use this option without specifying a SUFFIX value, autoinst will use the value "PS".
The default behaviour when this option is not given is to not modify font names at all.

See also "OpenType fonts and licensing issues" in "WARNINGS AND CAVEATS" above.

-target=DIRECTORY
Install all generated files into the TEXMF tree at DIRECTORY.

By default, autoinst searches the $TEXMFLOCAL and $TEXMFHOME trees and installs all files into the
first user-writable TEXMF tree it finds. If autoinst cannot find such a user-writable directory
(which shouldn't happen, since $TEXMFHOME is supposed to be user-writable) it will print a warning
message and put all files into the subdirectory "autoinst_output/" of the current directory. It's
then up to the user to move the generated files to a better location and update all relevant
databases (usually by calling texhash and updmap).

-vendor=VENDOR
-typeface=TYPEFACE
These options are equivalent to otftotfm's --vendor and --typeface options: they change the
"vendor" and "typeface" parts of the names of the subdirectories in the TEXMF tree where generated
files will be stored. The default values are "lcdftools" and the font's FontFamily name. These
options change only directory names, not the names of any generated files.

-logfile=filename
Write log data to filename instead of the default <fontfamily>.log. If the file already exists,
autoinst appends to it; it doesn't overwrite an existing file.

Specialist options
-defaultlining/-defaultoldstyle
-defaulttabular/-defaultproportional
Tell autoinst which figure style is the current font family's default (i.e., which figures you get
when you don't specify any OpenType features).

Don't use these options unless you are certain you need them! They are only needed for fonts that
don't provide OpenType features for their default figure style; and even in that case, autoinst's
default values (-defaultlining and -defaulttabular) are usually correct.

-nfssweight=code=weight
-nfsswidth=code=width
Map the NFSS code code to the given weight or width, overriding the built-in tables. Each of these
options may be given multiple times, to override more than one NFSS code. Example: to map the "ul"
code to the "Thin" weight, use "-nfssweight=ul=thin". To inhibit the use of the "ul" code
completely, use "-nfssweight=ul=".

-extra=extra options
Pass extra options to the commands for otftotfm. To prevent extra options from accidentily being
interpreted as options to autoinst, they should be properly quoted.

-manual
Manual mode; for users who want to post-process the generated files and commands. By default,
autoinst immediately executes all otftotfm commands it generates; in manual mode, these are instead
written to a file autoinst.bat. Furthermore it tells otftotfm to generate human readable (and
editable) pl/vpl files instead of the default tfm/vf ones, and to place all generated files in a
subdirectory "./autoinst_output/" of the current directory, rather than install them into your TeX
installation.

When using this option, you need to execute the following manual steps after autoinst has finished:

- run pltotf and vptovf on the generated pl and vf files, to convert them to tfm/vf format;
- move all generated files to a proper TEXMF tree, and, if necessary, update the filename database;
- tell TeX about the new map file (usually by running "updmap" or similar).

Note that some options (-target, -vendor and -typeface) are meaningless, and hence ignored, in manual
mode.

Also note that font name modification doesn't happen in manual mode.

-nofigurekern
Some fonts provide kerning pairs for tabular figures. This is very probably not what you want (e.g.,
numbers in tables won't line up exactly). This option adds extra --ligkern options to the commands
for otftotfm to suppress such kerns. Note that this option leads to very long commands (it adds one
hundred --ligkern options), which may cause problems on some systems; hence it is not active by
default.

AUTHOR

       Marc Penninga (marcpenninga@gmail.com)

       When sending a bug report, please give as much relevant information as possible;  this  usually  includes
       (but  may  not be limited to) the log file (please add the -verbose command-line option, for extra info).
       If you see any error messages, please include these verbatim; don't paraphase.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2005-2025 Marc Penninga.

LICENSE

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify  it  under  the  terms  of  the  GNU
       General  Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or
       (at your option) any later version.  A copy of the text of the GNU General Public License is included  in
       the fontools distribution; see the file GPLv2.txt.

DISCLAIMER

       This  program  is  distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
       the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU  General  Public
       License for more details.

VERSION

       This document describes autoinst version 20250107.

RECENT CHANGES

(See the source for the full story, all the way back to 2005.)

2025-01-07 The 'fix' in font metadata parsing that we introduced for Source Serif 4 was biting
Libertinus Serif Display (and maybe other fonts as well), so we now test if the family is
actually Source Serif 4 before applying that fix.

2024-01-04 We take a more generic approach to font metadata parsing; this should work better for fonts
with unusually named weights or widths. We now also warn in font metadata parsing could not
find a 'Regular' weight or width.

2023-12-30 Bugfix: font info parsing now works for Junicode 2.

2023-09-14 Added the "\up..." and "\it..." commands to the style file.

2023-06-28 Adapted font metadata parsing for Adobe Source Serif 4.

2023-02-01 Added support for the T4, T5, CS, L7X and QX encodings.

2023-01-31 If the fonts contain superior and/or inferior figures, the generated style file now redefines
the "\textsuperscript" and "\textsubscript" commands, and patches Latex's footnote mechanism
to use these figures (inspired by the realscripts package). Fixed a few bugs in metadata
parsing, style file generation and the "-t1suffix" option, so that the latter also works for
dvips and dvipdfmx.

fontools 2025-01-07 AUTOINST(1)