Re: [ft] Creating an [OT]TF font from BDF font

[Keith Packard]

On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 09:36 -0800, George Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 10:50, Keith Packard wrote:
> > should do the trick. It's reasonably functional, the plan was to use it
> > to eliminate BDF/PCF fonts from the X distribution and ship only TTF
> > files. That's been stalled for a couple of years as we need to preserve
> > all of the mystic BDF properties, and be able to regenerate BDF fonts as
> > needed (BDF being the only X standard for font distribution).
> I can now convert the bdf properties with fonttosfnt but I neglected to
> note that fonttosfnt fails to preserve the bdf SWIDTH values (the
> unscaled "PostScript" widths of each glyph).

Hmm. We want the same effect as FT_LOAD_NO_SCALE; is there some way to
make this work here? Obviously you wouldn't get a bitmap, but you should
be able to see the values in font units.

> So I shall give up on my attempts to produce a round-trip bdf->sfnt->bdf
> path based on fonttosfont. 

So this is the only limitation? For purposes of X font distribution,
this might be tolerable as X provides no mechanism to expose SWIDTH in
any case.

> FontForge can provide a round-trip path.

That's certainly an acceptable alternative; as I said, I'm only
interested in verifying the accuracy of the round-trip so we can discard
the BDF files and distribute only the TTF versions. Those are already
usable by any recent X.Org or XFree86 X server, so it's purely a matter
of ensuring that people running legacy X servers can get at the font
contents through some known mechanism.

-keith

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