OK, here's an update.
Michael Stutz wrote:
> 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).
Cool! But I'm looking to fiddle with handwriting (mine and others') ...
> 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.
Figlets???
> > 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.
Looks like GNU fontutils is the tool to use... see below.
> 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.)
Well, I'd bet that most of the problem is due to insufficient scanner
resolution. When you're looking at 8-point type, suddenly 600 dpi
doesn't seem like that much anymore...
However, if you hand-draw your fonts as I plan to, you can make 'em as
big as you want, and then you have less of a problem. (Assuming I can
figure out how to resize the vector image after conversion...)
> 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...
Good project!
Moving on: Evelyn Mitchell wrote with these two suggestions (I'm not
sure if the list got it, or just me:)
> bdffont: Part of the Andrew system
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/atk-ftp/web/andrew-home.html
>
> Gnu Font Utilities:
> Imageto: Image file to bitmap font or encapsulated post script
> IMGrotate: rotate image file 90 or 180 deg.
> Fontconvert: various manipulations on font files
> Charspace: add side bearings to a bitmap font (spacing between letters)
> Limn: convert bitmat to outline by curve fitting
> BZRto: BZR outline font to Metafont, type 1 and 3, BPL
> BPLtoBZR
> XBfe: X Bitmap font editor
> BZRedit: edit BZR fonts
> GSrenderfont: use ghostscript to rasterize postscript font outline
>
> These are available from www.gnu.ai.mit.edu
>
> Warning: I haven't used any of these, and I'd be very interested in hearing
> how they perform.
>
> Evelyn Mitchell
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I've downloaded Andrew, which is an interesting (and large) system... I
fired up the "font editor" but haven't had time to really look at the
docs, so I don't know what it's capable of. All I know is it produces
bitmap fonts which you can then presumably convert to Postscript using
the fontutils.
I quickly found that GNU fontutils is an old (1992) package that won't
compile on my glibc system.... some DejaNews-ing turned up this post,
which I will check out. I might be up and running soon!
Anyway, this project is not especially high priority, but _eventually_ I
will probably have some GPL'd fonts, most likely PS, which I will make
available.
=============================================
RE: [SuSE Linux] "bitmap" to outline postscript
Author:
Ted Harding
Email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date:
1998/10/28
Forums:
gnu.groff.bug
On 19-Oct-98 I wrote:
> Does anyone know of a package that can take a "bitmapped"
> black-and-white image and produce PostScript "outline" code which would
> draw the equivalent?
I am most obliged to everyone who responded to the above request.
Several people suggested Corel Draw or other commercial software (which
does not as yet, it seems, run under LInux). However, I donot propose to
go down such roads as yet.
Special thanks to Karl Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, joint creator of
GNU fontutils, for drawing my attention to this (which seems made for
the
job).
In its original (1992) form, however, this does not compile easily
(i.e. for me not at all) under Linux. I am therefore also grateful
to Oliver Corff, [EMAIL PROTECTED], for his work in changing
it so that it does compile more easily. However, this is for RedHat-5.1,
and it still did not compile on my SuSE-5.1. This may have been a glibc
problem. Anyway, with a few changes I was able to get Oliver's version
to
compile. Details are as follows:
Get Oliver's version (gnu fontutils-0.6 for Linux) from
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~corff/fontutils/*
Untar. If necessary, change GNUmakefile.in to reflect your basic X
directories (you will probably find that the default /usr/X11R6/lib/X11,
/usr/X11R6/include and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults need no change).
Also (and you probably will need to make this change) in two places
in GNUmakefile.in replace /usr/local/tex.local by wherever your TeX
texmf
tree is. Namely, at line 30 I changed
texmf_prefix = /usr/local/tex.local
to
texmf_prefix = /usr/lib/teTeX/texmf"
and at line 59 I changed
default_tfm_path = /usr/local/tex.local/fonts//:.
to
default_tfm_path = /usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/fonts//:.
Finally (and this is where the possible glibc issue arises), in the file
lib/fmod.c at and around line 53, I removed everything to do with the
line
extern int isnan(),finite();
The reason is that math.h, already included, defines these as macros and
the compiler treats the above occurrences as cpp macro calls, with
unwanted results.
After these changes were made, I got a clean compilation. Now I only
need
to find out how to really use the fontutils!
Best wishes to all,
Ted.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 28-Oct-98 Time: 12:37:22
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