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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label textrace</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Making outline fonts from Metafont</h3>
<p/><i>TeXtrace</i>, originally developed by Péter Szabó, is a
bundle of Unix scripts that use Martin Weber’s freeware boundary
tracing package
<a href="http://autotrace.sourceforge.net"><i>autotrace</a></i> 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
<a href="http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/"><i>FontForge</a></i> 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 <i>TeXtrace</i> are Péter Szabó’s own
EC/TC font set <i>tt2001</i> 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
<a href="FAQ-type1T1.html">“8-bit” type 1 fonts</a>).
<p/>Another system, which arrived slightly later, is
<a href="http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/"><i>mftrace</a></i>:
this is a small <i>Python</i> program that does the same job.
<i>Mftrace</i> may use either <i>autotrace</i> (like
<i>TeXtrace</i>) or Peter Selinger’s
<a href="http://potrace.sourceforge.net"><i>potrace</a></i> to produce
the initial outlines to process. <i>Mftrace</i> is said to be
more flexible, and easier to use, than is <i>TeXtrace</i>, but both systems
are increasingly being used to provide Type 1 fonts to the public domain.
<p/>The <i>MetaType1</i> 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
<a href="FAQ-type1T1.html"><i>Latin Modern</i> fonts</a>, are now
well-established, and a bunch of existing designs have been reworked
in MetaType1 format.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>MetaType1</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/metatype1.zip">fonts/utilities/metatype1</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/metatype1.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/metatype1/">browse</a>)
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=textrace">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=textrace</a>
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