Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!scott!mcglk
From: mcglk@scott.stat.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: METAFONT -> PostScript
Summary: Looking for experiences or ideas.
Keywords: PostScript, METAFONT, TeX, programming
Message-ID: <911@entropy.ms.washington.edu>
Date: 15 Jun 88 02:05:57 GMT
Sender: news@entropy.ms.washington.edu
Reply-To: mcglk@scott.ms.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Organization: Biostatistics Department, University of Washington, Seattle WA
Lines: 53

I've been bouncing around an idea for some time, and it seems time to get
some opinions from a lot of people who've been at this longer than I have.

What I'd like to do is write a program to convert METAFONT source programs
into PostScript.

To be honest, I haven't done a lot of analysis on this topic, but it seems
the advantages would be several-fold.

	1)  No big bitmaps.

		Even PK files can get messy, and you need one for cmr5,
		cmr7, cmr8, cmr10, cmr12, and so on.  Once the font has
		been compiled, you need to run the compiler again to get
		a slightly different font.

	2)  Resize and reshape on the fly.

		With one PostScript program (albeit a somewhat large
		PostScript program), you could resize fonts on the fly, like

			10	% pointsize
			4 mag	% magnification
			/cmr	% fontname
			setTeXfont

		I assume that setTeXfont would only set up parameters, since
		there would be another procedure (say, draw_shape) that would
		actually USE the parameters in order to sketch out the
		character.

	3)  *Fast* DVI->PS conversion, *fast* downloading (hopefully).

		Instead of having to download those bitmaps every time you
		want to go to nine-point cmr from ten-point, you download
		the cmr_draw procedure once, and just change a couple of
		parameters on the fly.

	4)  If wanted, half-toning, patterns, etc.

		Why recompile in METAFONT to get an 80%-gray font?  PostScript
		does it fairly fast.

I am interested in writing a program of this sort, but I'd be interested
in trying.  I'd be interested in hearing your comments BEFORE I start,
though--I have a tendency to get myself in too deep too quickly, and this
is one of those things I'd rather do right the first time.  :)

Thanks in advance for your comments.

				--Ken McGlothlen
				  mcglk@max.acs.washington.edu
				  mcglk@scott.ms.washington.edu