jkh@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard) (03/21/88)
Yeah, there's a utility available for this. If you haven't gotten a copy by the time this gets to you [Michael], let me know and I'll send one. This does, however, bring up an interesting point. A few months back, Jef Poskanzer posted his "pbm" package for creating/manipulating bitmaps in a special format and for converting bitmaps of other types to/from this format. I believe that this package made it into the R2 distribution, so everyone should be familiar with it. Now if we had a *font* manipulation package that followed the same design philosophy, that would be a *real win*. The much awaited font editor could be written to edit fonts in the "portable font format" (pff?) which one could convert to a bdf file for compilation. Since translators to/from things like sun fonts, X10 fonts, hershey fonts and nestle's fonts would also be available, any and all tools for manipulating/editing the portable fonts could be used to play with those too. Why, why, it would be *generally useful*, not just an X toy! WOW! It also means we could use Sun's font editor to mess with X11 fonts until somebody actually writes a pff editor. What do you think? Jeff? Can you have this ready in a week or so for beta test? *You're* the logical candidate, after all. Jordan
jef@webster.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer) (03/21/88)
It turns out that a major influence on the design of my portable bitmap format was a portable font format that was used at C-MU in the '70s. I guess it never caught on. I agree that a unified font-conversion package would be Real Nice. --- Jef
paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq) (03/21/88)
In <8803202006.AA08829@violet.berkeley.edu> jkh@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU
(Jordan K. Hubbard) writes:
# Now if we had a *font* manipulation package that followed the same design
# philosophy [as the pbm stuff], that would be a *real win*. The much awaited
# font editor could be written to edit fonts in the "portable font format"
# (pff?) which one could convert to a bdf file for compilation. Since
# translators to/from things like sun fonts, X10 fonts, hershey fonts and
# nestle's fonts would also be available, any and all tools for
# manipulating/editing the portable fonts could be used to play with those
# too. Why, why, it would be *generally useful*, not just an X toy! WOW! It
# also means we could use Sun's font editor to mess with X11 fonts until
# somebody actually writes a pff editor.
A problem with this is that some of these fonts formats are bitmap-based and
others are stroke-based (Hershey?). One font format, or one font editor, is
just not going to be able to handle both "families". Converters exist to go
from a stroke format to a bitmap format of a given point size, though the
ones I've seen are not perfect and the output needs to be tweaked by humans
before it looks "good". I've never seen a converter to take a bitmap font
and make a stroke font out of it -- it seems like a much tougher job.
The point here is that information is going to be lost when converting between
a stroke format and a bitmap format. Therefore any attempt at a portable font
format is going to have to either (a) deal with both formats as independent
types, or (b) ignore stroke fonts since they aren't as popular as bitmap ones.
Jef, I'm surprised you didn't mention this in your followup. Am I right here?
--
Paul A Vixie Esq
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