Re: quick ghoscript font question

[Erdmut Pfeifer <e.pfeifer@science-computing.de>]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 10:07:04AM -0500, David Z Maze wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Not to be picky or anything, but whether or not a font is available to
> X has *absolutely no bearing* as to whether Ghostscript likes it or
> not.  Ghostscript won't magically recognize X fonts; the various
> Postscript previewers based on Ghostscript will correctly render
> Ghostscript fonts in complete ignorance of X's font scheme.

I'd definitely second that...

> By way of useful advice, though, I'd read through
> /usr/share/doc/gs/Fonts.htm.  The "Adding your own fonts" section
> mentions how to convert a BDF bitmap font to a Type 1 font; I'm not
> clear if a PCF font can readily be converted to BDF, though (the other
> direction appears to be possible).

There is an old little program "getbdf" that can read out fonts via
the X server itself and store them to BDF format.

Google located it here, for example:

  http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/getbdf.c

If you have the X development stuff installed, you can easily build
it yourself

  gcc getbdf.c -o getbdf -lX11 -L/usr/X11/lib/

(if you find this too cumbersome, feel free to drop me a note off-list
and I'll send you the binary...[23k])

Then capture the font in question, e.g.

  getbdf -font 9x15 > 9x15.bdf

(the full name "-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO8859-1"
would work too, of course)

and use bdftops to create a Type1 font from that, as described in the
above mentioned gs docs.
But don't expect the quality of a typical PostScript font -- a bitmap
font will always look like one, even after this conversion ;)

Cheers,
Erdmut

PS: if you feel like fiddling around yourself with (bitmapped) X fonts,
there is a reasonably usable font editor xmbdfed. Unfortunately, it's
Motif based, so it's probably easiest to directly get the statically
linked binary, which is also available from

http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/xmbdfed-4.5-LINUX.tar.gz


-- 
Erdmut Pfeifer
science+computing ag
www.science-computing.de

-- Bugs come in through open windows. Keep Windows shut! --