poka.sh

 Docs

TFM

Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.

TeX Font Metric Preview.

At a glance
Purpose A TeX font metric file: Knuth's binary metrics (widths, heights, depths, ligatures, kerns, parameters) for a TeX font.
Extensions .tfm
Poka parser poka-tfm
Viewer poka-metadata-card-viewer
Depth tier Metadata card (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-tfm/src/main.rs (280 lines) and plugin.json. No unit tests or tests/samples.rs; the corpus has no .tfm sample. Covers .tfm. The card reads the twelve table lengths, the character range, checksum, design size, family name, coding scheme and face byte, and the slant, x-height and quad parameters. Judgement: B4: the header and the main parameters are decoded, but the per-character tables are not.

What Poka does not read

  • Per-character widths, heights, depths and italic corrections are counted, not listed
  • The ligature and kern program and extensible recipes are not decoded
  • Font parameters other than slant, x-height and quad are not shown
  • Virtual fonts (.vf) and OFM are not read

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • tfm (Texcraft) (candidate; MIT; Rust; https://docs.rs/tfm) — Parsers for binary .tfm and text .pl; early 0.1.0 release with low doc coverage. Repo: github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft.
  • star-tex tfm (candidate; BSD-3-Clause; Go; https://pkg.go.dev/star-tex.org/x/tex/font/tfm) — Decoder for TFM files (Parse function); page showed v0.7.1, not the latest.

Sources

  • parsers/poka-tfm/src/main.rs
  • parsers/poka-tfm/plugin.json