MAKEJVF(1)

✨ MAKEJVF(1) · General Commands Manual ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so the name is makejvf, and it's a Japanese VF file maker that turns a Japanese TeX TFM file into a VF file 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

makejvf [<options>] <TeX TFM file> <PS font TFM>

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

bestie, makejvf generates a Japanese VF file from a Japanese TeX TFM (JFM) file so that dvips can work with it 🫶

okay so here's the tea. When you're typing Japanese, pTeX looks at a JFM (like min10.tfm, jis.tfm, etc.), and that JFM has its own character widths and metric glue/kerns. For most punctuation and quotation marks, the width gets squished to less than 1 zw (zenkaku-width, which is just the width of ordinary Kanji) 🙈 and the metric glue/kerns get slid in as a stand-in.

Meanwhile, Japanese PS fonts are like "nah, every punctuation mark gets the full Kanji width" ✨ So when dvips processes the DVI, those characters need to be shifted left by the amount of glue/kerns that got inserted. Iconic behaviour, iykyk 😭

So the fix is: Virtual fonts (VF) and PS TFM files working together. When the VF has the shifting commands, the PS font TFM can keep its exact character widths 💖

That's where makejvf comes in. It reads a pTeX JFM file (the one called <TeX TFM file> up in SYNOPSIS) and spits out two things: a VF file with the same basename as <TeX TFM file>, and a JFM file for the PS font (the <PS font TFM> from above) 🧚

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -C — Condensed mode, also known as "Cho-tai" 🌈
• -K <PS-TFM> — Maps Kana (or, more precisely, anything that isn't Kanji) over to a different PS font JFM called <PS-TFM> 🎀
• -b <integer> — Base line shift amount. The integer is relative, with the character height treated as 1000. A positive number lowers the characters, and a negative number raises them ⬇️⬆️
• -m — Swaps single/double quotation marks (' and '') for single/double prime marks (the "minute" ones) when writing vertically 🍓 It does this by using the prime and double prime glyphs (JIS 0x216C and 0x216D, Unicode U+2032 and U+2033) instead of actual quotation mark glyphs designed for that job (Unicode U+301D and U+301E/U+301F).
• -a <AFMfile> — The input AFM file used for Kana-tsume mode. ⚠️ This option is unsupported, so don't count on it, bestie 💀
• -k <integer> — The Kana-tsume margin amount (narrower spaces between Kana). The integer is relative, with the character width as 1000. You're supposed to pair this with -a. ⚠️ This option is also unsupported 💀
• -i — Starts the mapped font ID at No. 0 in the output VF. By default, makejvf starts at No. 1 🔢
• -e — Enhanced mode, where the horizontal shift amount comes from the glue/kern table in the input JFM file 🧠

By default, makejvf uses a hard-coded horizontal shift amount that's (mostly) tuned for Japanese fonts 🫶 When you turn on enhanced mode (-e), the shift is calculated from the input pTeX TFM (JFM) file instead, so the VF usually fits that JFM best ✨

For standard Japanese JFMs (like jis.tfm and its relatives), both modes give basically the same result, no significant difference 💅 For simplified and traditional Chinese JFMs (like upschrm-h.tfm and uptchrm-h.tfm), enhanced mode is the move, it's better 👑 And for min10.tfm and its derivatives:

😭 Never enable enhanced mode for min10.tfm or its derivatives, because the characterization in min10.tfm is non-standard. Trust me on this one, bestie.

• -t <CNFfile> — Uses <CNFfile> as your configuration file 🎀
• -O — Leaves out VF entries for characters with the default metric 🙈 ⚠️ This cannot be combined with -t.
• -u <Charset> — UCS mode! The available charsets are: gb (GB, Simplified Chinese), cns (CNS, Traditional Chinese), ks (KS, Korean), jis (JIS, Japanese), jisq (JIS quote only), and custom (your own user-defined CHARSET from <CNFfile>, see the CONFIGURATION FILE FORMAT section) 🌍

Options below only work in UCS mode, so keep that in mind:

• -J <PS-TFM> — Maps single/double quote over to another JIS-encoded PS font TFM 🦋
• -U <PS-TFM> — Maps single/double quote over to another UCS-encoded PS font TFM 🦋
• -3 — Turns on set3, which means non-BMP character support (in UCS mode). By default, makejvf skips anything at or above U+10000 to keep the file size down and dodge problems with old DVI drivers. Newer versions of dvipdfmx and friends can handle VFs with >=U+10000 (that's set3 in DVI language), so -3 might be super helpful 🚀
• -H — Uses half-width Katakana 🎀

🧚 EXAMPLE 🧚

okay so if you want to use min10 as Ryumin-Light-H, just run:

makejvf min10.tfm rml

That generates min10.vf and rml.tfm for you ✨ Next, put those files in an appropriate directory under your TEXMF tree, and add this line to psfonts.map:

rml Ryumin-Light-H

🎀 CONFIGURATION FILE FORMAT 🎀

With the -t option, you can give makejvf your own custom settings for generating a VF. The syntax looks like this:

% comment line
MOVE <code>    <right>   <down>

REPLACE   <code>    <new code>
CHARSET   <code>,<code>,<code>..<code>,<code>,
+    <code>,<code>..<code>

Each line starts with a command, and the fields are TAB-separated 🫶 Any line starting with % is a comment, and empty lines get ignored 🙈

The MOVE command sets the horizontal/vertical shift amount for one individual <code>. The REPLACE command swaps <code> out for <new code>. The CHARSET command sets up the custom character set for the output VF, and the + character keeps going from the line before it 💖

There's an example of this in the uptex-fonts project. Check out the GitHub repository at <https://github.com/texjporg/uptex-fonts> 🌈

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

If you want the more detailed Japanese description of makejvf, look in $TEXMFDIST/doc/fonts/ptex-fonts/README_makejvf 📖

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manual page was written by the Japanese TeX Development Community, at <https://texjp.org>. For more info, check out the GitHub repository at <https://github.com/texjporg/ptex-fonts> 💜

Many thanks to Atsuhito KOHDA <kohda@debian.org> for providing another manpage on the Debian GNU/Linux system 🫶

---

That's the whole tea, bestie! 🌸 Thanks for reading MAKEJVF(1) with me, you're literally the best 💅✨