Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!uxc!garcon!flute.cs.uiuc.edu!grunwald
From: grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Reading PK fonts in the server
Message-ID: <GRUNWALD.89Jan24142630@flute.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 24 Jan 89 20:26:30 GMT
Sender: news@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 37


Has anyone looked into reading ``pk'' fonts in the X server?

The advantages of this are numerous:

	+ PK is compact ( smaller than e.g, compressed SNF fonts,
	  e.g., ``cmr10.300pk'' is 5084 bytes and ``cmr10.300.snf.Z''
	  is 7140. cmr10.300.snf (uncompressed) is 15156 )

	+ It has a machine independent definition and is well documented.

	+ It's got a FREE front-end (i.e. MetaFont), allowing people
	  to produce their own fonts.

	+ It makes a dvi previewer much more affordable (Ok, so it's
	  not a good reason).

The downside is:
	+ yet more code (should be less than 8K though, all told)

	+ while `pk' is machine independent, the reader would need
	  to be customized for the final bit, byte and word orders.

I was thinking about this when I wrote the metafont (pxl/gf/pk) -> bdf
converted -- it's silly to have the same information in two formats.

If I take ``pk'' fonts, shrink/enlarge them and then convert them to
``bdf'' and eventually to snf, I use twice the amount of disk space.
I would rather generate reduced versions of the metafont fonts
(e.g., cmr10.150pk ) using metafont.

If anyone takes a stab at it, use the `pk' reader from `xdvi' -- the one
in `texx' is too tied into the rest of the dvi library.

Dirk Grunwald
Univ. of Illinois
grunwald@m.cs.uiuc.edu