bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (01/10/88)
>I would also be interested in finding out if there are any bizarre fonts >available (elaborate large deco, 60's balloon style, on and on). I can >design these things or copy them from font sheets bought at the local art >store, but I'd rather see what already floating about before I redundify >the universe. This only applies to X11: I am finishing up a program which translates from MetaFont's GF file format to a few other formats, particularly BDF (X11) and postscript user defined font format. This should allow font design and generation at basically arbitrary resolution (and of course to tap into whatever metafont stuff you can find, the tape has a bunch of stuff.) Actually what's been slowing me down are a lot of the details with the postscript stuff. I can create down-loadable fonts now and they even sort of work (the images certainly work) but I have to figure out all the width info stuff and how people (applications) expect it to be presented. If anyone knows about that sort of stuff and wants to suggest a particular format (say, based on the way some other major applications use it) I'd certainly appreciate the e-mail. Actually, the program is structured to encourage adding other output formats so spewing a GF file out as vfont or .onx would only require understanding a data-structure in the program, adding a command line switch (or more if the user should supply other info) and looping out the info for that format, the existing routines (eg. for BDF) could be used as skeletons. You should realize that this sort of thing is not a panacea, it's just a start as the character sets available in each font and how they'll be mapped when in use is still up to the programmer. This is a hairy biz, people sometimes just think of the neato images and expect it will all magically fall together. It takes work and will probably require further refinement of the program (although I may decide that a lot of that should be done with MetaFont, like character ordering, rather than by hacking the GF files.) While you're waiting you should order another disk, heh heh. -Barry Shein, Boston University P.S. yes, the program will be made publicly available via typical channels, just watch the list.