[Scribus] Linux Font Editor?

[John Jordan]

I spent some time this morning trying to get the TIPA fonts 
installed on my Windows computer. As someone noted earlier, the 
problem is that I have the pfb and afm files, but not the pfm files. 
On the Windows computer I use ATM 4.1 Deluxe, which sees no 
fonts in the folder unless the pfm file is there as well as the pfb file.

So I am trying to generate pfm files for the TIPA fonts. I have 
Fontforge installed on my Ubuntu-64 machine and it appears that it 
will generate pfm files. However, I can't figure out which buttons to 
push to get it to do so. It's also kind of hard to use because the 
author used a medium blue background with black text, and really 
small characters in the menus -- you have to squint to read 
everything. Bad color choices.

Anyway, I opened tipa10.pfb in Fontforge, and then clicked on File 
> Generate fonts. This opens a dialog box, but everything I have 
tried just gives me an error message. There is no button labeled 
"Generate." The only button that seems to be the one to generate 
the font file is Save. When I click on it, it just pops up an error 
message that says "save failed," but no further information as to 
why. The dialog box shows the new font name as TeX-tipa10.pfb, 
but if I try to edit the name of the new font file to be generated all 
that happens is that the selection in the window moves up and 
down (like it is interpreting all keystrokes as up and down arrows). 

It also doesn't help that I know little about the internal workings of a 
font. Once several years ago I used Fontographer to add a glyph to 
a font, and I also used it to convert some Type 1s to TrueType 
back in the days when there was no ATM for Windows NT. But all I 
did was push buttons to accomplish that. I bet it could generate 
pfm files, but it won't run now because my current Windows 2000 
computer has 1 Gb RAM. So I guess I'm kind of stuck with 
Fontforge, and I don't have the time to become a font guru. Maybe 
there is a simpler tool to generate pfm files, since that is all I need 
to do. Any suggestions?