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texfont fails with syntax error

(Tested on: TeXFont version 2.2.1; afm2tfm version 8.1 (dvips(k) 5.94b); Windows XP)

If you are installing a Type 1 font (.pfb and .afm files) using texfont, and you come up against an error message like this:

; expected: ! syntax error
CC Aacute 2; PCC A 0 0; PCC acute 182 150;

                 ^

then you have probably run into a bug in your version of afm2tfm, which is a program called by the texfont script. This happened to me with Monotype's Century Gothic font family. You have 2 options:

  1. get a fixed version of afm2tfm (NB I don't know if this exists yet);
  2. edit the AFM files to work around the problem.

To take the second option, open each .afm file in a text editor and find the section headed StartComposites. In each line in this section, up to the line EndComposites, make sure that there is a space before every semicolon as well as after (there are 3 semicolons per line). For example, the line referenced above would now look like this:

CC Aacute 2 ; PCC A 0 0 ; PCC acute 182 150 ;

After you have done this to all the CC lines, afm2tfm should work and texfont should complete successfully.