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From: erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: pcf fonts
Message-ID: <1990Nov21.012609.11803@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 21 Nov 90 01:26:09 GMT
References: <9536@orca.wv.tek.com>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News)
Reply-To: erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune)
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc.
Lines: 15

The Display Postscript extension (DPS) uses glyph names and the
scalable widths of characters.   You can change the encoding 
(ordering) of glyphs on the fly in DPS, so it asks for glyphs
by name instead of position.   DPS uses scalable widths (as opposed
to bitmap widths) to do WYSIWIG formatting.

If you never use DPS, you can safely omit scalable widths and glyph
names to save space.   The font reader deals gracefully with missing
tables, and the server will only complain if one of the tables it
needs (metrics, bitmaps, properties, accelerators or encoding) is missing.

You could also write some fairly straightforward code to re-encode 
a font to some other character set (IBM PC, EBCDIC, etc).

-- Erik