Re: Fonts revisited

On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> I missed most of the thread on fonts here... could someone point me at some
> programs or web sites that would allow me to make TrueType fonts (under
> either Windows or Linux)?
>
The best place is www.pyrus.com. Your best choice would be Scanfont,
since it allows you to scan a picture of your font and simply drag the
outlines into place. All pyrus programs use the same drawing engine,
so if you want to construct every outline from scratch, you could try to
make do with their $99,- Typemaker.  All their products are for Windows
and don't run under Wine. I've got Scanfont myself, and I can vouch for
it. Not much use if you want to construct fonts with more than 250 glyphs,
though: for that you need Fontlab. The earlier 2.5 version actually runs
under Wine, but not good enough to work with.

There is one shareware program for Windows, Softy, but it's not good. Not
good enough to actually work with.

If you've got a copy of CorelDraw (3.0 or higher), and I remember once
getting version 4 free with a printer cartridge, you can save outlines
to fonts, too. The result will be usable, even though there's no hinting
and no kerning to speak of.

For Linux, there's a Python + Gtk program that allows you to change the
outline of one glyph of a Postscript font, but not save it... That's
the lot. Matty Farrow has been working on a type designer for Unix/X11
for years, but stubbornly refuses to release it before it's finished,
so that's vapourware.

You could try to make a bitmap font with one of the bdf editors, and
convert that to postscript, but the result will be nasty.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt