Xref: utzoo comp.text.tex:7716 comp.sys.next:18191 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!aero-c!gumby.dsd.trw.com!deneva!news From: blanford@spf.trw.com (Ronald P. Blanford) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex,comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Metafont to outline font Keywords: font, metafont, postscript Message-ID: <2843D6FE.1369@deneva.sdd.trw.com> Date: 29 May 91 16:29:49 GMT Sender: news@deneva.sdd.trw.com Organization: TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, CA Lines: 95 This is a (somewhat belated) summary of responses to an earlier question. My question was: Is this on the FAQ list? I want a Metafont to PostScript outline font conversion program. Is such a beast in any of the archives? Is it even possible? Please mail answers. The answer appears to be (as usual) both yes and no. Berthold K.P. Horn writes: | Yes, there is mf2ps, but it is worthless, producing ridiculously large | numbers of curveto's for simple shapes. | | It is possible, but hard, to do it right. Nobody has even come close yet. | Right now everyone is instead fitting curves to huge bitmaps made from | METAFONT. A bit of a kludge, but given that there is no code to do the | right thing.... | | By the way, the CM fonts are available in outline form from Blue Sky | Research and the LaTeX fonts from Y&Y. The most promising response came from Thomas Ridgeway : | There is and there isn't. A mf2ps was put together, and | is supposed to work by patching into metafont and writing | out PS code at the point where mf is converting contours | to bitmaps. It looked sorta like it might work with a lot | more fine tuning, but the guys who did it (reported in TUGboat | 11-4 I think) patched in to the tangle-generated pascal code | rather than the WEB source, and there is some kind of dependence | on the Sun libraries made for the particular version they were | using. So, not exactly plug and play. I had a week in December | where I was patching their changes into the web change file and | adding some external routines, running through a modified web2c | and got something that would compile and run but produce bad output. | In the meantime, I have re-thought how I ought to do it and don't have | time before summer to play on it, so . . . | | Pierre tells me that John Hobby is working/has mostly done MetaPost | which is some kind of metafont-Postscript conversion, but I think | more oriented to graphics than font generation. In any case it is | not yet available. | | Here are sources for mf2ps if you want to take a look: | Archie@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca says mf2ps is archived at | | Host emx.utexas.edu (128.83.1.33) | Last updated 17:54 2 Apr 1991 | | Location: /pub/mnt/source/tex/mf2ps/mf2ps | FILE rw-r--r-- 12165 Dec 11 21:06 mf2ps1.h | FILE rw-r--r-- 1713 Dec 11 21:06 mf2ps1.p | FILE rw-r--r-- 1247 Dec 11 21:06 mf2ps2.h | FILE rw-r--r-- 4043 Dec 11 21:06 mf2ps2.p | FILE rw-r--r-- 19616 Dec 11 21:06 mf2ps3.p | FILE rw-r--r-- 444338 Dec 11 21:07 mf2psv.p | | Host toklab.ics.osaka-u.ac.jp (133.1.12.30) | Last updated 14:46 24 Apr 1991 | | Location: /tex | FILE rw-rw-r-- 547465 Mar 7 23:42 mf2ps.tar.Z | | Host utsun.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp (133.11.11.11) | Last updated 05:06 20 Apr 1991 | | Location: /TeX | FILE rw-r--r-- 547465 Mar 4 01:41 mf2ps.tar.Z | | Host nuri.inria.fr (128.93.1.26) | Last updated 05:23 9 Apr 1991 | | Location: /TeX/tools | FILE rw-rw-r-- 543523 Dec 13 14:51 mf2ps.tar.Z | | Host ugle.unit.no (129.241.1.97) | Last updated 05:26 19 Apr 1991 | | Location: /pub/tex/utils | FILE rw-r--r-- 518545 Dec 12 11:34 mf2ps.shar.Z The reason I wanted the conversion was twofold. I need PostScript versions of both an IPA font and some internal company logos. Both are already available in Metafont. I checked with Blue Sky Research, and they have about 40 CM and math fonts (an impressive achievement at a reasonable price) but nothing more. We have converted the company logos by hand. Not having the time to spend, I have deferred the IPA project for now, hoping that Tom will get mf2ps working acceptably sometime this summer. My thanks to both Berthold and Tom. -- Ron