Oh, PFAs are ASCII formatted, PFBs are binary. You can use the
free Type 1 utilities to convert between them. The reason that
the files are PFA in our archive was that they were easier to
debug when inserted into PostScript output. PostScript should
handle the binary versions correctly, they're just harder to
read that way.
You can get these tools at:
http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/t1utils-1.9.tar.gz
> What's the difference and all that? It'd be nice to be able to just use
> one font package instead of installing, essentially, the same fonts twice.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. We install fonts that happen
to come from GhostScript. We haven't actually modified any
of these fonts (except for the binary->ascii conversion),
but AbiWord and X need the fonts.dir to be use the fonts. If
you're hinting that you'd rather just use the fonts.dir around
the normal GhostScript fonts, well, you should be able to do
that. :) The GhostScript fonts were chosen because, well,
they were the first batch of freely re-distributable Type 1
fonts I found. We're planning on adding/changing the standard
font package, and even adding fonts for other character sets
by the 1.0 release (some for Latin-2, Latin-3, perhaps some
for Eastern encodings).
-- Shaw Terwilliger