Re: Software for writing in a conscript

Henrik Theiling skrev:
> Hi!
>
> Benct Philip wrote:
>> Henrik Theiling wrote: ...
>>> I've used Metafont and Metapost to create fonts, both
>>> under Linux (but they work under Windows, too, I
>>> assume). Metafont enables you to produce native fonts
>>> for LaTeX. In my other project I'm planning to create
>>> TTFs somehow from the output of Metapost (not yet done).
>> Fontforge is said to do quite a decent job of autotracing
>> (actually potrace does the tracing) TeX bitmap fonts,
>> since these are so high resolution. I haven't gotten it
>> to work under cygwin yet, though, mostly for lack of time
>> to really try... ...
>
> Ah, interesting information, thanks! Will have a look at
> that. It's not for the Metapost project, though, since I
> used it instead of Metafont in order to get Postscript
> curves. The output seems to be quite easily readable and
> it is not rasterized, but fully scalable.
Yes, but isn't it the case that some MF fonts can't be
generated with MP, since they use MF functions not
available in MP?

> When I have a lot of time, I want to write some program to
> try to autoconvert it to TTF, keeping the scalability.
> This is one of my do-it-yourself-from-scratch projects,
> which are very time- consuming but a lot of fun. :-)
Lest you reinvent the wheel: there are already several MF >
Type1 converters. It may be easier to use one of those and
then convert the Type1 to TTF.
See <http://www-hep2.fzu.cz/~piska/TUG2004/piskatb2.pdf>

> As usual with such projects, even the input for Metapost
> is generated by a Perl script, because the script has such
> a large number of similar glyphs.
I too have to use a Perl script to produce Sohlob and Kijeb
text: because I don't know if/how one can specify characters
in the Unicode Private Use area as a right-to-left script i
have to pre-process all texts with a Perl script applying
the reverse functionto each line. It doesn't matter too
much, since the script is also a transliterator from the
Latin alphabet transcription, which is not one-to-one in
either language. If I get the time, and the hang on
Graphite, I'll try to do it in Graphite.
--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)

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