Re: OT: FontForge (was: writing system)

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 04:32:40PM -0800, Arthaey Angosii wrote:
> Emaelivpeith Pipian:
> > I personally use fontforge, but you kinda need to either have cygwin or
> > linux on your machine, as it requires X Windows.  For the most part it's
> > very nice, and supports OpenType Tables, which most other cheap or free
> > font creators cannot work with.
>
> I'd never heard of FontForge before. It looks pretty impressive.
FontForge is the reincarnation of another font-making project that has
been mentioned on this list before. It has since made large strides in
improvements, and I think rather befits its new name. :-)


> Do you (or anyone else) have experience with both FontForge and
> MetaFont, to compare the two? Yes, I know that they are very
> different beasts.  I'm just looking for opinions on which I might
> want to use -- although when I skimmed the FontForge FAQ, it looked
> like it might be possible to import MetaFont fonts into the program
> or vice versa...
It probably does this by scan-converting bitmaps produced by MetaFont
at various sizes. I seriously doubt it's even possible to write a
general-purpose convertor (esp. to TT fonts) that can losslessly
convert arbitrary metafonts, since MetaFont is a full-fledged
programming language, and this would probably amount to an undecidable
computation. :-)

I'm still struggling as to whether I should do my conscript fonts in
MetaFont or TT. My personal tastes incline towards MetaFont, but it is
rather inaccessible by non-LaTeX crowds, which makes TT the more
practical choice, at least for the time being. Ah, the dilemma between
principle and popularity, as so aptly put by the signature my Perl
script miraculously picked for this occasion.


T

--
Democracy: The triumph of popularity over principle. -- C.Bond

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