P86@DHDURZ1.BITNET (mahilata) (03/15/91)
this is the first page of a web that has passed its first few trial runs,
logo10, gray, and cmr10, successfully.
since this is not finished yet, i would like to send it out to interested
people for testing, comments, and so on.
@* Intro.
This is a pk-to-cdps font converter, for one or the other of the cdpf
printers. To this program are known the printers 4250, 3800, and 3820.
(what happened to the old apa6670?)
Sources to this program are Pete Sih's et al.~old |PXLcvt| and my own
PK reader which has, up to now, survived quite a few Unix based
screen and device drivers.
I must confess that I know nothing about CDPF, and I won't touch it
without guidance, so I just took |PXLcvt|
asis, webbed it (hopefully without damage), spliced open the front end,
and inserted the pk reader.
Webbing is the right thing to do in cases like this.
Problems, things that I do not know, and suggestions:
\item- This program is VM-CMS based (with VSPascal),
with record structure and filenames the kind.
Is there a need to change this, perhaps to byte stream? I would be happy.
Or is cdps irrevocably glued to IBM?
\item- I would very much like to extend the codepoint range to |0..255|.
Is this possible, and has someone a transparent codepage to do this?
\item- Is there a way to assert output correctness other than to actually
print? We have, at this site, only a 3820, and, even if the font library
manager is friendly, testing is at best clumsy.
\item- Limits, like character size, are somewhat
$\theta [\hbox{\it arbitrary}, \hbox{\it historic}]$ now.
What are the hard limits?
\item- The program |PXLcvt| which I have is tagged 12 August 1986 by
Alan Spragens. Are there updates or specification changes which I should
know?
\item- Some of the things that go into the cdps font are taken from the
pk info. There are traces of them being taken from the tfm once.
Which is proper?
\item- University of Washington introduced some conventions to save the
font generation log in the font file via |xxx| commands. Is there a way
to continue this practice?
\item- What is one to do about single characters failing, f.ex.~outsized?
The |banner| string defined here should be changed whenever \.{PKcvt}
gets modified.
@d banner=='This is PKcvt Version -40'
still looking for the outside of the asylum...
mahilata
...and thanks a lot for all the fish!