| title | category | tags | permalink |
|---|---|---|---|
Where are the `am` fonts? |
errors |
deprecated |
/FAQ-amfonts |
One still occasionally comes across a request for the am
series of fonts. The initials stood for "Almost [Computer] Modern",
and they were the predecessors of the Computer Modern fonts that we
all know and love (or hate)†.
There's not a lot one can do with these
fonts; they are (as their name implies) almost (but not quite) the
same as the cm series; if you're faced with a document that requests
them, the only reasonable approach is to edit the document to replace
am* font names with cm*.
† The fonts acquired their label "Almost" following the realisation that their first implementation in MetaFont79 still wasn't quite right; Knuth's original intention had been that they were the final answer.
The appearance of DVI files that request them is sufficiently rare that no-one has undertaken the mammoth task of creating a translation of them by means of virtual fonts.
You therefore have to fool the system into using cm* fonts
where the original author specified am*.
One option is the font substitutions that many
DVI drivers provide via their configuration file —
specify that every am font should be replaced by its
corresponding cm font.
Alternatively, one may try DVI editing — packages
dtl (DVI Text Language) and dviasm
(DVI assembler) can both provide round trips from DVI to
text and back to DVI. One therefore edits font names
(throughout the text representation of the file) in the middle of that
round trip.
The DTL text is pretty straightforward, for this purpose:
fontnames are in single quotes at the end of lines, so:
dv2dt -o ‹doc.txt› ‹doc.dvi›
(edit the txt file)
dt2dv -o ‹edited.dvi› ‹edited.txt›
(you have to compile the C programs for this).
Dviasm is a Python script; its output has font
names in a section near the start of the document, and then dotted
about through the body, so:
python dviasm.py -o ‹doc.txt› ‹doc.dvi›
(edit the txt file)
python dviasm.py -o ‹edited.dvi› ‹edited.txt›
Both routes seem acceptable ways forward; it is a matter of taste
which any particular user may choose (it's not likely that it will be
necessary very often...).