swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick) (04/05/88)
Fonts are available commercially from several sources in the BDF format. Project Athena purchased several sets from Adobe; the ones you mention are among these. BTW, 2 years ago when we purchased the Adobe fonts, they were putting character metrics in a separate (AFM) file, which you had to remember to request along with the BDF file (we didn't remember...). I've no idea if this is still Adobe's practice.
guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) (04/11/88)
The Adobe fonts Courier, Helvetica, Times and Symbol are actually distributed with Andrew in several sizes from 8-22 (only printable ASCII though). You might pick these up even if you can't afford to install Andrew; look in a place like ./contrib/andrew/fonts. The format they use seems to be different again; it is similar in idea to BDF and the Andrew distribution contains a compiler from this format to BDF. -- Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam guido@cwi.nl or mcvax!guido or (from ARPAnet) guido%cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net
karlton@decwrl.dec.com (Philip Karlton) (04/12/88)
In article <8804051226.AA01348@LYRE.MIT.EDU> swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick) writes: >Fonts are available commercially from several sources in the BDF format. >Project Athena purchased several sets from Adobe; the ones you mention >are among these. > >BTW, 2 years ago when we purchased the Adobe fonts, they were putting >character metrics in a separate (AFM) file, which you had to remember to >request along with the BDF file (we didn't remember...). I've no idea >if this is still Adobe's practice. Adobe does not actually support the BDF format. They distribute their bitmap fonts in 2.0 (usually called Adobe Screen Format). ASF files, to a certain extent, cannot stand alone. They depend upon the AFM files to hold the bulk of the font metrics and other interesting things found in font dictionaires. The BDF format was developed with Adobe's permission explicitly to support the needs of the X Window System: to have a single file hold all of the relevant information about a single set of bitmap glyphs. The BDF format is not much of extension of the ASF format. The information in an AFM file for any font is generally available in any PostScript(R) printer that supports that font. PK