{"id":3619,"date":"2015-12-14T14:42:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T19:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=3619"},"modified":"2022-07-01T14:13:34","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T18:13:34","slug":"importing-ttf-fonts-into-latex-with-kerning-ligatures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2015\/12\/importing-ttf-fonts-into-latex-with-kerning-ligatures\/","title":{"rendered":"Importing TTF Fonts Into LaTeX With Kerning & Ligatures"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend\u00a0I spent some time\u00a0revamping the styling of some of my work and\u00a0gaming documents. Generally\u00a0I write all of these in LaTeX<\/a>. Long story short, for the uninitiated, it’s a typesetting markup language. Somewhat\u00a0similar to HTML, you write a text document peppered with commands and then run it through a compiler which produces a beautiful PDF or\u00a0similar\u00a0output. Even a marginally trained eye can identify the difference versus output from a\u00a0word processor or web page, but most people will instinctively feel that\u00a0the document is\u00a0more professional.<\/p>\n

Some of the\u00a0foundations of LaTeX are a\u00a0antiquated though. \u00a0The initial release of the underlying engine (TeX<\/a>) dates to 1978. I wasn’t even born yet, and I’m an old man with a child of my own now! An oft cited\u00a0trouble area remains\u00a0fonts.\u00a0The compiler doesn’t just hook into your system fonts, and you can’t just dump any old font file into a folder and have it work.<\/p>\n

Fortunately working with fonts\u00a0has gotten vastly better in the ~16 years I’ve been using LaTeX. The needed supporting programs are included\u00a0in the major TeX\/LaTeX distributions now, and\u00a0a few short notes are around for using TrueType Fonts (TTF)\u00a0that will mostly work with\u00a0pdflatex<\/code>, such as this post<\/a>. If you’re using\u00a0XeTeX or LuaTeX then you probably have an easier ride, but are on your own.<\/p>\n

Kerning & Ligatures<\/h2>\n

Sadly though, even in this utopic\u00a0typesetting future\u00a0of ours, there’s still always a gotcha!\u00a0It’s not widely remarked, but that commonly cited process does not carry over kerning and ligatures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ligatures<\/a> are letter and symbol combos that are handled specially by a font, e.g., an ‘f’ followed by an ‘i’ combined to have the dot of the ‘i’ (formally the\u00a0tittle<\/a> of the ‘i’)\u00a0be the drop tail of the ‘f’ (formally the hood).<\/p>\n

\"Commonly

Commonly cited and used ligatures. (image from Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

Kerning<\/a> is\u00a0adjustments to the inter-symbol spacing between characters, e.g., a ‘V’ followed by an ‘A’ should be pushed together to avoid creating a large visual space.<\/p>\n

\"Commonly

Commonly cited and used kerning examples. (image from Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

That’s exactly\u00a0how I realized the kerning of my fancy TTF fonts was not being carried through into LaTeX, when I saw this untidily spaced output:<\/p>\n

\"Kerning

Kerning fail!<\/p><\/div>\n

At first I thought maybe the font, having gone through the wringer of one shady font website after another, didn’t\u00a0include kerning and ligatures. But a quick check in FontForge<\/a> revealed all was\u00a0well with the font.<\/p>\n

\"Inspecting

Inspecting kerning in FontForge.<\/p><\/div>\n

Conversion<\/h2>\n

Long story short, in the still awful machinery\u00a0that is TeX fonts,\u00a0the compiler can only read shapes from the TTF font files. The metrics—height, width, baseline, etc.—need to be extracted out to a separate TFM file.<\/p>\n

\"Font

Font metrics. Oh hell yeah. (image from Apple Developer)<\/p><\/div>\n

That TFM format can capture kerning and ligatures, but the standard conversion tools don’t\u00a0include them. Instead you need to:<\/p>\n