pdc@ecs.ox.ac.uk (Damian Cugley) (06/08/91)
You may remember mfjob -- my wrapper around METAFONT with extra features
for dealing with families. Well, I have now changed the name to mff.
This is to prevent confusion with the MFjob that is part of Eberhard
Mattes' emTeX (a PD distribution of TeX for MS-DOS and OS/2 systems).
As well as changing the name I've made a few other changes in its
user-visible behaviour -- on the gounds that it inevitably needs to have
some of the files it reads renamed anyway, so all the messing about may
as well happen at the same time. Therefore this is version 2.8 rather
than 2.7.2...
It would be a really good idea if all the old versions were forgotten
about and mff used instead ... they will only lead to confusion.
Work on Malvern (a METAFONT font for which mff is particularly useful)
continues, slowly.
After the ^L is info on how to get it, and changes made...
Damian
HOW TO GET IT
At present it is on the Oxford archive-server. This program will not
send files of more than 100K bytes and will not send two shar files in
one mail message, so you have to send two requests (in separate mail
messages) to get a 2-part package.
Send a message of the form
send CATEGORY FILE
to <archive-server@prg.ox.ac.uk>, where CATEGORY is either "tex" for
Malvern or "prog" for mff, and FILE is one of:
mff-1.shar ) mff 2.8 (a C program for UNIX
mff-2.shar ) but only tested on Suns so far) beta release
Includes 3 sample meta-fonts.
mff-patch00.shar patch files to convert mfjob 2.7.1 -> mff 2.8
malvern-0.3-1.shar ) Malvern 0.3 (METAFONT code plus a couple
malvern-0.3-2.shar ) of extra files)
malvern-sup1.shar supplement to Malvern -- driver files
for people *without* mff
The server also understands the messages "help" and "index CATEGORY".
The files are sent as "shell archives" -- ".shar" files. On UNIX
systems they are unpacked by running the Bourne shell (/bin/sh) on them.
Each part of the package unpacks into a directory named after the
version and part number to prevent clashes.
WHAT MFF IS
mff grew out of a UNIX shellscript I had for running METAFONT and
installing the TFM and PK files. Its unique feature is that it will
parse a font name "mabi10" as "10pt Malvern bold italic" and run
METAFONT with variables like |weight| and |italicness| set appropriately
(all that is user-definable, of course). The driver file understands
these and sets stem widths etc. based on them. The practical upshot of
which is that I have *one* driver file ma.mf and a command like
mff ma{,i,bx}{8,10,12}
creates 9 fonts automagically. mff isn't vital but it is *very*
convenient for creating fonts on the fly.
mff comes with three sample meta-fonts thrown in for free!
= CHANGES SINCE MFJOB 2.7.1 =
Damian Cugley <pdc@prg.ox.ac.uk> Sat. 1 June 1991
mfjob has been renamed mff
This is to prevent confusion with Eberhard Mattes' MFjob. MFjob does a
similar job to mff, and is part of the emTeX distribution for MS-DOS and
OS/2 personal computers.
This means that files named after the program -- such as .mfjobrc -- now
have new names. While I was at it I changed the per-project startup
file to rc.mff rather than .mffrc; this makes it a visible file which is
probebly more sensible. The system startup file was renamed rc.mff to
match.
the first input command -- a hack to get the name right -- is removed
This means that it does not produce empty <font name>.mf files.
Instead METAFONT/GFtoPK creates the TFM and GF files as <driver>.tfm and
<driver>.XXXpk (because jobname is set to the driver name nopt the font
name). These are renamed to <font name>.tfm and <font name>.XXXpk in
the appropriate directories.
To support this, the -T and -P options are now *filename* templates not
*directory* templates. %f.tfm and %f.%n%p are appended if necessary, so
directory names can still be used.
A side effect is that only one log file is produced per driver file,
instead of one per font. This is usually an advantage -- unless there
is some sort of error (in which case mff terminates and the log file is
preserved) the log files are not wanted. This results in a lot less
clutter.
Another consequence is that `mff cmr12' does not work any more --
formerly it would input cmr12.mf and because this ended in `bye' the
second (spurious) `input' was ignored! Now a new option has been added
to suppress the parsing step altogether -- so `mff -S cmr12' now ought
to work.
Font sizes can include p for a decimal point
For those people that need such things, ma7p5 can be used to mean 7.5-pt
Malvern. Note that this means you can not have a suffix ending in
<digit>p.
Configuration now all in Makefile -- -D directives overrride config.h
man pages for shar and testfont
gray.mf -- a simple hackette for making grayfonts easily
a small program searchpath added
This is a corollary to the searchpath module that is used by mff. It is
only useful in shellscripts (in the style of dirname(1) and basename(1)).
some bug fixes
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