[comp.windows.x] Looking for an afm to bdf filter

hansen@madis.af.MIL (John Hansen) (11/05/90)

Mike, (and other interested readers of c.w.x & xpert)

	I have a kludged together half-way decent program (actually it
has to be the ugliest program I've ever written...) that can create bdf
files from Digital's pcf files.  The character "encoding" information
still needs to be hand coded into the resulting bdf file if there are any 
missing characters.  I have successfully used it to convert from pcf
to snf a set of fonts which came with a commercial package called
ALIS; So Far, no problems.  I have also tested it on some randomly
selected pcf fonts from the DecWindows distribution and aside from the
encoding problem they all seem OK.  If you are interested I can mail
you a copy of the code and with luck it will compile and run without
problems on your machine (No guarantees.)  FYI, the process which I
use to convert pcftosnf is as follows:

%dxshowfont -g fontname.pcf >fontname.info
%inftobdf fontname.info >fontname.bdf
--- Check bdf file for correct character encoding values. ---
%bdftosnf fontname.bdf >fontname.snf
%rm fontname.info fontname.bdf

Hopefully, no errors, etc...  

The above process lends itself well to a shell script which you might
name "pcftosnf".  If the encoding process worked (I'm working on that)
then all would be well.  As it is you have to put a little effort into
it.  Of course for massive conversions, manually editing bdf files would
get very tedious after a while.  For the ALIS files I converted all the
character names (on the STARTCHAR line) contained hex numbers equal to their
proper encoding value.  And there were no missing characters.  In that case
I was able to automate the entire conversion process with a shell script.
For other fonts from DecWindows this is not so.  Oh well!

On my VS3100 under Ultrix 3.2 the program compiles and runs OK.  I
compile it with:

%cc -o inftobdf inftobdf.c

Let me know if you are interested.  Oh, I was inspired to attempt this
program by the efforts of Mark Leisher, mleisher@nmsu.edu, in his
snftobdf program.  You will see from the code that I thought it all up
myself.  (I write C code like a FORTRAN programmer :-)

PS: this program is not intended to allow people to wrongfully use fonts
provided in a compiled format.  If I have stepped on anyones proverbial toes
by creating this monster please _gently_ let me know.

John Hansen
Mechanical Engineer
madis!hansen@lognet2.af.mil


DISCLAIMER: I speak only for myself, and occasionally my wife & daughters.

mike@puffin.USS.TEK.COM (Mike Ewan) (11/06/90)

Has anyone out there written an afm (Adobe Font Metric) to bdf
file filter.  I'd like to use the afm files distributed with
Ultrix 4.0 to build snf font files in order to use DECwindows
clients with an X11R4 server.  Yes, I know about the fonts.alias
that's available, but it doesn't handle double-high, double-wide
fonts properly.

Thanks,
Mike
 Michael Ewan    (503)627-6468      Internet:  mike@raven.USS.TEK.COM
 Unix Systems Support                   UUCP:  ...!tektronix!puffin!raven!mike
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