Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!beta!hc!ames!pacbell!vixie!paul
From: paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X10 fonts
Message-ID: <843@vixie.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 88 15:53:40 GMT
References: <8803202006.AA08829@violet.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq)
Organization: Vixie Enterprises, San Francisco
Lines: 32

In <8803202006.AA08829@violet.berkeley.edu> jkh@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU
						(Jordan K. Hubbard) writes:
# Now if we had a *font* manipulation package that followed the same design
# philosophy [as the pbm stuff], 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.

A problem with this is that some of these fonts formats are bitmap-based and
others are stroke-based (Hershey?).  One font format, or one font editor, is
just not going to be able to handle both "families".  Converters exist to go
from a stroke format to a bitmap format of a given point size, though the
ones I've seen are not perfect and the output needs to be tweaked by humans
before it looks "good".  I've never seen a converter to take a bitmap font
and make a stroke font out of it -- it seems like a much tougher job.

The point here is that information is going to be lost when converting between
a stroke format and a bitmap format.  Therefore any attempt at a portable font
format is going to have to either (a) deal with both formats as independent
types, or (b) ignore stroke fonts since they aren't as popular as bitmap ones.

Jef, I'm surprised you didn't mention this in your followup.  Am I right here?
-- 
Paul A Vixie Esq
paul%vixie@uunet.uu.net
{uunet,ptsfa,hoptoad}!vixie!paul
San Francisco, (415) 647-7023