[tex-live] Metafont fonts and X (font server?)

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Tue Jun 10 00:31:56 CEST 2008


Frederik Hohlfeld writes:
 > Hi
 > 
 > Is there a way to use Metafont fonts with X? Apart from generating
 > them and converting them to other bitmap formats before using
 > them. I'm thinking about some way to generate them as needed from
 > the Metafont source, maybe using a font server.
 > 
 > Is that just a pipe dream? If so, is it because there's no
 > implementation or because there's no conceivable way to achieve
 > this?

Hi Frederik, 
you are obviously looking for a solution which creates BDF files (or
whatever X11 understands) directly from metafont sources.  I'm not
aware of such a tool but I think that the amount of time needed to
convert bitmaps is negligible if compared with a metafont run. 

You could try:

  ftp://ftp.nstu.ru/pub/sources/x/fonts/pktobdf.c.gz

I didn't try it myself, but it obviously had been written by honorable
people who are well known in the TeX world.

  pktobdf, adapted from "pktopx in C by Tomas Rokicki" by AJCD 1/8/90

(AJCD = Angus J. C. Duggan, the author of psutils).

If you are interested, the BDF format is well documented, see

  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/font/pdfs/5005.BDF_Spec.pdf 

Regards,
  Reinhard



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