4 Font Reconstitution and Metafiles
Font reconstitution is a new, mostly invisible, feature which
the previewer uses to avoid font encoding problems in non-Unicode Windows
(95, 98, Me).
Many of the TrueType fonts in Windows contain characters that are encoded
``unreliably''. For example, the Windows New Times Roman font has ligatures
available at codes like 0xfb01,
but many legacy printer drivers cannot render a character code in that range.
Such characters are encountered with \usepackage{times}.
Whenever a TeX virtual font thus calls on the previewer to render an
unreliable character code, the previewer builds
and installs a temporary, reconstituted TrueType font out of the Windows font.
This reconstituted font is a new symbol font which encodes the
formerly unreliably-encoded characters in ``safe'' character codes.
The previewer thereafter automatically renders unreliable codes in the old font
with the safe codes in the reconstituted font.
The previewer builds and installs these reconstituted fonts as needed,
and deletes them when exiting.
The previewer keeps the reconstituted fonts private, so that they
do not show up in font selection dialogs or in the Font
applet.
Reconstituted fonts may be called for in pages you copy to the clipboard with
Edit+Copy in the previewer. If you see characters appearing as '?'
(question marks) when you paste previewed pages into other applications, check
that font reconstitution is turned on in the Options+Expert menu. When
using the clipboard with the previewer, you must copy, paste and render in the
target application with the previewer still active and displaying the copied
document. Metafile pictures on the clipboard are not
portable to another system, or even to a later time on the same system. If
you exit the previewer, the application that plays the metafile will show
random font substitutions and character codes for the reconstituted ones that
disappeared.