TTF2AFM(1)

✨ TTF2AFM(1) ✨

okay bestie, pull up a chair, we're talking about ttf2afm — the little cutie from the General Commands Manual section that turns your TrueType fonts into Adobe Font Metrics files. she's giving translator, she's giving bridge-builder, and honestly? we're obsessed 🫶

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💖 NAME 💖

ttf2afm — a utility to generate AFM files for TrueType fonts. periodt.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ttf2afm [OPTIONS] FONTFILE

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so ttf2afm is what we use to generate Adobe Font Metrics (AFM) files for TrueType (TTF) fonts, which is the whole entire reason they can be used with TeX. like, that's the vibe. no cap.

she takes the name of a TrueType font file as a required argument, so yes, you must give her a font, she's not doing this for free 🙈. she can also take one or more of the options from the list below, and heads up bestie:

-i and -u are mutually exclusive — pick one, you cannot have both, it's giving toxic situationship and we don't do that 💅

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -i — force printing glyph names in the form indexdecnum`. **decnum is decimal, she's being specific about it 💜
• -u — force printing glyph names in the form unihexnum`. **hexnum is hex, we love a base-16 moment ✨
• -c name — write encoding tables to file name.eMN, where M is the platform ID and N is the encoding ID. two numbers, one filename, iconic.
• -v — print program version. that's it, that's the whole option, a little "hi, here's who I am" 🎀
• -e enc — encode AFM output using the encoding vector from enc
• -o outfile — output to file outfile instead of standard output. redirecting without shell redirects, we stan a queen who does it herself 💅
• -m num — use Unicode mapping num in the font

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🔥 Platform numbers 🔥

so the platform numbers can be one of:

• 0 — Apple Unicode
• 1 — Macintosh
• 2 — ISO
• 3 — Microsoft

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🍓 Encodings 🍓

and the encodings can be:

• 0 — Roman (if the platform is Macintosh)
• 0 — Symbol (if the platform is Microsoft)
• 1 — Unicode (if the platform is Microsoft)

note the tea bestie: 0 shows up twice and means two totally different things depending on the platform. Roman vs Symbol. it's giving double identity, main character energy fr fr 🌈

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

• afm2tfm(1)
• afm2pl(1)
• FontForge — https://fontforge.org
• LCDF TypeTools — https://lcdf.org
• A closer look at TrueType fonts and pdfTeX, Han The Thanh — https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-1/tb94thanh.pdf

go read the Han The Thanh paper, iykyk 📚✨

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😭 BUGS 😭

found a bug? send bug reports to <pdftex@tug.org> — it's a public mailing list, so everyone gets to see, no secrets here bestie 💀

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🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

ttf2afm is part of pdfTeX and was written by Han The Thanh. absolute legend, no notes 👑

This manual page was originally written by C.M. Connelly, for the Debian GNU/Linux system, and updated by Karl Berry and others. group project, but it ate 🫶

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🧚 cute little sign-off 🧚

and that's the whole page babes 💖 this one's from Web2C 2025, dated 8 March 2022. go make some AFM files, you're gonna slay ⭐

stay hydrated, read your manuals, and remember: every flag matters 💅