Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!agate!pasteur!ames!pacbell!att-ih!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!rce229
From: rce229@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: postscript fonts from bitmaps ?
Message-ID: <136800001@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 88 03:37:00 GMT
References: <22148@bbn.COM>
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Nf-ID: #R:bbn.COM:22148:uxa.cso.uiuc.edu:136800001:000:891
Nf-From: uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!rce229    Mar 17 21:37:00 1988


> I am interested in (semi-) automatically generating scalable
> postscript fonts from bitmaps. 

There are two companies in the Macintosh world that claim to
have programs to convert bitmaps into Postscript object-oriented
descriptions: Silicon Beach Software and and T/Maker (I think).

These might help in producing the character description part
of the font.

A longer but tested method is to trace (on a Macintosh) the
scanned images into Postscript using Adobe Illustrator or
Fontographer (by Altsys).  The latter program will generate
all the Postscript to go along with the descriptions; if
you use Illustrator you need to write it all yourself.  Illustrator,
however, makes much nicer looking curves (which is why I had
to use it for two fonts I converted).

I don't know if any of these tasks can be accomplished without
these Macintosh programs.

- Rob
  rce229@uxa.cso.uiuc.cso