Making outline fonts from Metafont
TeXtrace, originally developed by Péter Szabó, is a
bundle of Unix scripts that use Martin Weber’s freeware boundary
tracing package
autotrace to
generate Type 1 outline fonts from Metafont bitmap
font outputs. The result is unlikely ever to be of the quality of
the commercially-produced Type 1 font, but there’s always the
FontForge font
editor to tidy things. Whatever, there
remain fonts which many people find useful and which fail to attract
the paid experts, and auto-tracing is providing a useful service here.
Notable sets of
fonts generated using TeXtrace are Péter Szabó’s own
EC/TC font set tt2001 and Vladimir Volovich’s
CM-Super set, which covers the EC, TC, and the
Cyrillic LH font sets (for details of both of which sets, see
“8-bit” type 1 fonts).
Another system, which arrived slightly later, is
mftrace:
this is a small Python program that does the same job.
Mftrace may use either autotrace (like
TeXtrace) or Peter Selinger’s
potrace to produce
the initial outlines to process. Mftrace is said to be
more flexible, and easier to use, than is TeXtrace, but both systems
are increasingly being used to provide Type 1 fonts to the public domain.
The MetaType1 system aims to use Metafont font sources, by way
of MetaPost and a bunch of scripts and so on, to produce high-quality
Type 1 fonts. The first results, the
Latin Modern fonts, are now
well-established, and a bunch of existing designs have been reworked
in MetaType1 format.
- MetaType1
- fonts/utilities/metatype1 (or browse the directory)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=textrace