Re: [QUESTION] How to make a font?

On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 10:13:56AM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
> yet though (the 500-page manual is certainly not foreign to this :)) ). I also
> managed to get hold on the Metafont book, so it's an option I will try for my
> fonts.
[snip]

Well, if you ever want to make Type 1 fonts out of your efforts, you
probably *don't* want to start with Metafont. You'd probably prefer to
create/scan font outlines and adjust them with other tools, and then
convert them to METAFONT (there are utilities to do this).

The problem (which is also its advantage, paradoxically) with METAFONT is
that it's too powerful -- a font made for METAFONT is in fact, a complete
computer program that creates the font given a set of parameters. Since
the METAFONT language is quite complex, there aren't any utilities (and
nor can there be, in the general case)  that can deal with METAFONT and
produce any meaningful output in, say, Type 1 format.

You *can* hand-convert METAFONT programs into Type 1 by tracing out the
curves that it generates, etc., and building the Type 1 font that way. Of
course, this is very tedious, and also quite difficult, since Type 1 can't
express a lot of nuances that METAFONT can. Plus, it defeats the purpose
of automation -- unless you're a professional fontographer, you probably
don't need the level of power METAFONT gives you (at least to start with).
Outline curves in Type 1 is good enough for most conscripts, anyway, and
you can always generate METAFONT programs from them easily. You can then
hand-tweak the resulting METAFONT programs should you see the need to.

(Of course, you might have to do extra magic with those .tfm files if you
want to do ligatures and stuff, which METAFONT handles quite beautifully.)


T

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