PLTOTF(1)

🌸 PLTOTF(1) — the glow-up 💅

okay so first thing, bestie: this little icon lives in the General Commands Manual section, and she's here to convert your property list files into TeX font metrics. no cap, she's a whole vibe.

✨ NAME ✨

pltotf — converts a property list (pl) file into TeX font metric (tfm) format 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

pltotf [-verbose] pl_file[.pl] [tfm_file[.tfm]]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So here's the tea: the pltotf program translates a (plain text) property list file into a (binary) TeX font metric file. literally what it says on the tin. 🌈

Which means — and this is the slay part — after you edit the property list file, you can generate a revised tfm file for use with, for example, tex(1). iconic behavior honestly.

pl_file gets extended with .pl if it lacks a suffix. and listen: no path searching is done. none. zero. she is not out here hunting for your files, you gotta tell her exactly where they at. 🙈

If you don't hand her a tfm_file, then the basename of pl_file with suffix .tfm is used instead. otherwise, tfm_file is extended with .tfm if it lacks a suffix. easy peasy. 🍓

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🌟 OPTIONS 🌟

• -v, -verbose — by default pltotf operates silently (mysterious, main character energy honestly 💅). with the -v option (a.k.a. -verbose), some reports get printed on stdout. she speaks! 🗣️
• -help — the standard -help option is supported 🫶
• -version — the standard -version option is also supported ⭐

heads up bestie: see tex(1) for the deets on command-line parsing. that's where the lore lives. 📖

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• tftopl(1) — the reverse-direction sister 🧚
• Donald E. Knuth, TeXware.
• Font utility topic on CTAN: https://ctan.org/topic/font-util
• Package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/pltotf
• Section in the Web2c manual: https://tug.org/texinfohtml/web2c.html#pltotf-invocation
• Typeset source code, including the PL file format description: https://ctan.org/pkg/knuth-pdf

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Donald E. Knuth wrote the program — yes, that Knuth, the absolute legend 👑. It was published as part of the TeXware technical report from Stanford. Howard Trickey, Pavel Curtis, and Richard Furuta originally ported it to Unix. shoutout to the port squad fr fr 🫶

Public discussion list and bug reports: https://lists.tug.org/tex-k

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 — brought to you by Web2C 2026, dated 24 January 2026, PLTOTF(1) and out~ 🎀✨