Q. I'm having problems using buildafmdir to create fonts.
A. Buildafmdir can either print out bogus warning messages about duplicate lines, or even crash, depending on the ordering of the lines in the AFM files it parses. The directives that buildafmdir cares about are:
FontName
FullName
FamilyName
Weight
EncodingScheme
ItalicAngle
Any font developer should test their fonts on our system. One thing they should do is run buildafmdir on a directory containing their fonts (one structured like /NextLibrary/Fonts). If there are bogus messages about duplicate lines, this is harmless. However, if buildafmdir crashes, this can probably be fixed by moving the above directives so that they are early in the afm files (right after the "StartFontMetrics" line would work).
For related information, read the paper "Fonts in NextStep," on-line as /NextLibrary/Documentation/NeXT/SysRefNotes/15_WinServer.