On Thu, 29 Oct 1998, Paul Winkler wrote:
> I've always been curious to try making my own fonts, preferably
> TrueType. Does anyone know what tools are available for Linux? I haven't
> found much so far...
These are all the font-making tools I know of:
The "Linux Console Font Editor" lets you make your own console fonts --
cool! I don't know of a Debian or Red Hat package for this program, but its
on sunsite in the fonts subdir as "cse.tar.gz". It has a nice editor where
you can create all the characters in a font and then save it.
METAFONT is Knuth's font-making language/package. You could probably make
some great fonts with this (the ones that come with TeX are awesome). I
never saw an archive of METAFONT-created fonts though.
<ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/metafont-for-beginners.tex> is an
introduction (in TeX). A list of METAFONT fonts (from '94) is at
<ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/metafont-list>. It's good to see that
<http://milieu.grads.vt.edu/intromf.html> is still around -- this guy put
out a document looong ago ('93) called "Milieu," describing his experiences
making METAFONT fonts on a Linux system circa 1993. He's turning it into a
book, it's downloadable off that page...
MetaPost is built on METAFONT, and is a generic graphic language that
outputs in PostScript. It can be used to create PS fonts (which I understand
are better than TT fonts, and can be converted to TT also):
<http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/MetaPost.html>.
ASCII figlet fonts are easy to make. There's a document that comes with the
figlet package which tells you how to roll your own.
> What I'd really like to be able to do is to take a scanned image of an
> alphabet, manipulate it in GIMP, then somehow convert it into a font.
> The last part of the process is a big blank to me.
If nobody else knows, and you later find out how to do this, can you please
post your findings to the list? I'd love to be able to do this. (I
understand that duplicating a font via scanning doesn't always give the best
results; a lot of pirated fonts use this method, and the pirated versions
are never identical to the "real" font.) I've been working on a project
lately to collect all of the freely-available fonts that I can find,
including PS, TeX, console fonts, etc., so if I find info on more software
for making fonts, I'll post it...
