Encoding Description Files (General Purpose PostScript Generating Utility)

6.2.2 Encoding Description Files

The encoding description file describing the encoding key is named key.edf. It is subject to the same rules as any other a2ps file:

- please make the name portable: alpha-numerical, at most 8 characters,
- empty lines and lines starting by ‘#’ are ignored.

The entries are

‘Name:’

Specifies the full name of the encoding. Please, try to use the official name if there is one.

Name: ISO-8859-1

‘Documentation/EndDocumentation’

Introduces the documentation on the encoding (see Documentation Format). Typical informations expected are the other important names this encoding has, and the languages it covers.

Documentation
Also known as ISO Latin 1, or Latin 1.  It is a superset
of ASCII, and covers most West-European languages.
EndDocumentation

‘Substitute:’

Introduces a font substitution. The most common fonts (e.g., Courier, Times-Roman...) do not support many encodings (for instance it does not support Latin 2). To avoid that Latin 2 users have to replace everywhere calls to Courier, a2ps allows to specify that whenever a font is called in an encoding, then another font should be used.

For instance in iso2.edf one can read:

# Fonts from Ogonkify offer full support of ISO Latin 2
Substitute: Courier              Courier-Ogonki
Substitute: Courier-Bold         Courier-Bold-Ogonki
Substitute: Courier-BoldOblique  Courier-BoldOblique-Ogonki
Substitute: Courier-Oblique      Courier-Oblique-Ogonki

‘Default:’

Introduces the name of the font that should be used when a font (not substituted as per the previous item) is called but provides to poor a support of the encoding. The Courier equivalent is the best choice.

Default: Courier-Ogonki

‘Vector:’

Introduces the PostScript encoding vector, that is a list of the 256 PostScript names of the characters. Note that only the printable characters are named in PostScript (e.g., ‘bell’ in ASCII (^G) should not be named). The special name ‘.notdef’ is to be used when the character is not printable.

Warning. Make sure to use real, official, PostScript names. Using names such as ‘c123’ may be the sign you use unusual names. On the other hand PostScript names such as ‘afii8879’ are common.