Fonts & Encodings

8.5. Tools for Converting Fonts under X

It is quite natural that a plethora of tools for converting one format to another has arisen over time to contend with the multiplicity of font formats used under Unix. Of these we shall mention some that are the most solid, the best documented, and the best supported by their programmers. The reader will find vastly more through a simple Google search: if 'A' and 'B' are names of font formats, search for A2B or AtoB. For example, a search for "bdf2pcf" yielded 249 results, one for "bdftopcf" yielded 72,300.

8.5.1. The GNU Font Tools

This is a panoply of tools developed in 1992 by Karl Berry and Kathryn Hargreaves [77]. The goal is to perform auto-tracing on bitmap images to obtain their vector contours. Today there are more powerful systems for this task (ScanFont, by FontLab; mftrace, by Han-Wen Nienhuys; FontForge, by George Williams; etc.). But the individual GNU tools may be of interest in their own right.

Karl Berry defined his own vector format, named BZR. It is a pivot format from which the utility bzrto can generate METAFONT or PostScript Type 1 (in GSF format, a variant of PFA that ghostscript uses) or PostScript Type 3. There is also a human-readable BZR format called BPL (in the fashion of TFM/PL, VF/VPL, etc.). We can convert BZR to BPL and vice versa wit the help of the tools bzrtobpl and bpltobzr.

8.5.2. George Williams's Tools

George Williams, author of FontForge, which we shall describe at length in Chapters 12–14, is ...