Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU!jkh
From: jkh@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: re: X10 fonts
Message-ID: <8803202006.AA08829@violet.berkeley.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 88 20:06:52 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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Yeah, there's a utility available for this. If you haven't gotten
a copy by the time this gets to you [Michael], let me know and
I'll send one.

This does, however, bring up an interesting point. A few months
back, Jef Poskanzer posted his "pbm" package for creating/manipulating
bitmaps in a special format and for converting bitmaps of other
types to/from this format. I believe that this package made it
into the R2 distribution, so everyone should be familiar with it.

Now if we had a *font* manipulation package that followed the same
design philosophy, that would be a *real win*. The much awaited
font editor could be written to edit fonts in the "portable font
format" (pff?) which one could convert to a bdf file for compilation.
Since translators to/from things like sun fonts, X10 fonts, hershey
fonts and nestle's fonts would also be available, any and all tools
for manipulating/editing the portable fonts could be used to
play with those too. Why, why, it would be *generally useful*,
not just an X toy! WOW! It also means we could use Sun's font editor
to mess with X11 fonts until somebody actually writes a pff editor.

What do you think? Jeff? Can you have this ready in a week or so
for beta test? *You're* the logical candidate, after all.


					Jordan