Re: OT: FontForge (was: writing system)

Hi!

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> writes:
>...
> > 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. :-)
But before rendering bitmaps, Metafont converts the program to cubic
splines, so there is another level of generic representation that
could be converted.  No idea whether it is used, but theoretically,
it's possible to convert before bitmaps are rendered.

> I'm still struggling as to whether I should do my conscript fonts in
> MetaFont or TT. My personal tastes incline towards MetaFont,
Mine, too. :-) Although Tyl Sjok was so tough that I needed a C
program to compute glyphs in PostScript.  This was since Metafont and
LaTeX unfortunately communicate at bitmap level, using ids (i.e.,
charcodes) for the characters, which was very restricting for Tyl
Sjok.  The theoretical total number of glyphs is enormous for Tyl
Sjok.

> but it is rather inaccessible by non-LaTeX crowds,
More importantly, to web representation.  I would not pay attention to
other OSes than the ones I use, because I doubt people want to learn
my conlangs.  If there are requests, I will rethink my strategy. :-)
However, web representation is now much more important to me than a
LaTeX document of my grammar, so Metafont is not my first choice
anymore for that reason.  I usually use PostScript and render the font
as graphics.

**Henrik

Reply