Conversion Tools: Fonts

The TrueType HOWTO

TrueType HOWTO by Brion Vibber.

ttf2pt1

Many tools as the True Type Font to Postscript Type 1 Converter ttf2pt1, to convert fonts and metrics for X11, Star-Office, ..

fontutils

The fontutils package includes the programs bpltobzr, bzrto, charspace, fontconvert, gsrenderfont, imageto, imgrotate, limn, and xbfe. These create fonts for use with Ghostscript or TeX (starting with a scanned type image and converting the bitmaps to outlines), convert between font formats, etc. The package also includes the libraries libbzr.a, libgf.a, libpbm.a, libpk.a, libtfm.a, and libwidgets.a. platform: Linux
license: GPL, LGPL

fonty-dev

This package contains Tools for developing console fonts:

• psf2sbf - converts .psf font binary file to text file
• sbf2psf - converts .sbf font source to binary file

platform: Linux

lojteng

lojteng converts lojban text into codes suitable for displaying with the various Tengwar truetype fonts. The actual translation is done according to Eric S. Raymond's proposal for using Tengwar to write Lojban.
platform: Linux
license: GPL

Transformations from other fonts to X fonts

Quoting from the Chinese-HOWTO: There is a TTF2BDF program, written by lwj, can let you transform the TTF fonts of Windows into BDF fonts. This is a Win32 program, thus you must execute it on Windows 95 or NT.

Next step is that change BDF into PCF, then you can use it under X. (You can use BDF directly under X; but that BDF carried with bigger sizes means PCF will be a better choice though.)

# bdftopcf -t < ming.bdf > ming.pcf

You may change HBF into BDF and PCF fonts, too. Here is the ftp site for the utility of transformation.

ftp://ftp.ifcss.org/pub/software/fonts/utils/hbf.tar.gz

# hbftobdf ccfs24.hbf > ccfs24.bdf
bdftopcf -t < ccfs24.bdf > ccfs24.pcf

Other nice font conversion programs are available at:

ftp://crl.nmsu.edu/CLR/multiling/General/ttf2bdf-1.8-ELF.tar.gz

ftp://crl.nmsu.edu/CLR/multiling/General/xmbdfed-3.0.tar.gz

bm2font

Converts bitmaps to LaTeX fonts rwp_AT_lst.de by Roger Pook.
platform: Linux

mminstance

The mminstance package contains two programs for creating instances of PostScript Type 1 multiple master fonts (an instance is a single-master version of the font, created at a specific point in its design space). With these tools, you can use multiple master fonts with any program that requires single-master fonts, like afm2tfm, ps2pk, and X Type 1 font servers. Mmafm creates a single-master AFM font metrics file from multiple master AMFM and AFM files. Mmpfb creates a single-master font outline file (PFA or PFB) from the multiple master font itself.
platform:rm: Linux
license: GPL

macfont

Converts Mac Type 1 fonts,
platform: Linux

mcvert

MacBinary <=> BinHex 4.0 and more file conversion utility,
platform: Linux

afm2pfm

Type-1 font metrics converters,
platform: Linux

fntutl

font converters for console fonts,
platform: Linux

ttftodxf

Converts Truetype font characters to DXF files SimtelNet
platform: MS-Windows95/98

International Components for Unicode (C/C++)

ICU provides a Unicode implementation with functions for formatting numbers, dates, times, and currencies according to locale conventions, transliteration, and parsing text in those formats. It provides flexible patterns for formatting messages, where the pattern determines the order of the variable parts of the messages, and the format for each of those variables. These patterns can be stored in resource files for translation to different languages. ICU provides code and data to handle the complexities of native language collation, searching, and other processes. It also provides a mechanism for accessing strings from resource files, whereby common strings can be shared across countries that have the same language. Included are more than 100 codepage converters for interaction with non-unicode systems. Converter data is now stored in a single common file, which greatly simplifies installs. Header files are now under "unicode/" to avoid conflicts. A transliteration framework with rules has been added. Thai collation, and initial Rule and Dictionary based break iteration is supported (used for Thai). Converter mappings updated to reflect IANA names.
platform: Linux additional platform support including OS/390, OS/400, BSD, and SGI.
license: OpenSource

Cyrprint

Cyrprint converts postscript files generated by netscape (original pages must be in koi8 encoding). It can be used as a pass-through filter. It adds cyrillic fonts to the beginning of the file and substitutes font names in the original PS document. The substituti on and addition of fonts can be controlled with styles.
platform: Linux
license: GPL