[Devel] Re: Bitmap font file reading progress

[Mark Leisher]

    Francesco> Dear Mark, I started working yesterday on PCF support in
    Francesco> FreeType: I am adapting the original X code to the FreeType
    Francesco> framework.  Besides, the data structures I am writing down will
    Francesco> assure better support in the case of sparse encodings.

Sounds good!

    Francesco> As to BDF support, I am really impressed by your work.  I am
    Francesco> planning to reuse your parser: before asking you to work on it
    Francesco> I will look deeper into your code, to find out whether it could
    Francesco> be used to read other formats.  FON/FNT support, for example,
    Francesco> is already in FreeType.

As for other formats, here is a list of the other bitmap font formats
supported in xmbdfed and the name of the file that has the code for the
importing the format:

HBF fonts             - bdf.c plus hbf.[ch]
Sun VFONT fonts       - bdfcons.c
Linux PSF fonts       - bdfcons.c
DOS [EV]GA fonts      - bdfcons.c (loads all three sizes if they are present)
Metafont PK/GF fonts  - bdfpkgf.c
Windows FON/FNT fonts - bdffnt.c (this was taken from Wine, the same as
                        Freetype and is probably not needed)

I was thinking of adding an import function for Roman Czyborra's Unifont
format in xmbdfed 5.0, but don't think it is critical at this point because
Roman provides a converter to BDF already.
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Mark Leisher
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