Enscript: How to use a different font?

Question

I downloaded the font RobotoMono-Regular.ttf here, converted it to RobotoMono-Regular.afm with this tool and copied this file to /usr/local/share/enscript/afm where other .afm files reside. In there is also the file font.map. I added the entry RobotoMono-Regular RobotoMono-Regular (the first entry is the font name, the second the file base name of the .afm. When I use enscript --font=RobotoMono-Regular ..., I don't get the new font, though. Is there anything else that needs to be done? File permissions seem all fine. If I specify the font names of other fonts saved as .afm in this directory, enscript respects them.

This is under macOS. The question here seems somewhat related but is different.

Answer 1

The .afm files are font metrics, that say how much space to leave for each character, so enscipt can calculate where to put line breaks and so on. To actually draw the characters a printer also needs the PostScript code describing how to draw each character. This is in a separate .pfa (or .pfb) file that you must also provide in the afm directory, with the same basename as the .afm file.

Check if the pfa files was also generated by your web-tool. If not, you can use ttf2pt1 which should be in some suitable package for your system.

When enscript sees the 2 files, it "downloads" the pfa file so it is included into the output and the printer then knows how to print everything. The other fonts you see there without a pfa file are standard fonts that the printer is expected to have built-in, so no download is needed. Using enscript -v should show you a message like

downloading font "RobotoMono-Regular"

By printer, I include programs like GhostView (gv) and so on.