Re: Google Summer of Code - Ideas List, please discuss

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:12 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:42 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>> Somewhat independently, there is a mf2pt1.pl Perl script that
>>>>> (shudder) generates .pe script to transform a metapost output to a
>>>>> Type 1 font.  I guess that could be done more concisely directly as
>>>>> a python script.
>>>>
>>>> This sounds like a very nice addition.  Maybe generating Python should
>>>> be the default, retaining the old .pe approach with as an option.  The
>>>> FontForge list is quite helpful in case questions arise.
>>>>
>>>> Scott Pakin, author of mf2pt1, will certainly add any improvements.
>>>
>>> There is also a program/utility Metatype in the TeX world, and it has
>>> been used for generating various Type1 fonts from Metafont sources.
>>
>> This looks very outdated, and it seems to use autotrace.  We abandoned
>> traced outlines for exact conversions a few years ago.
>
> I should be surprised, actually.  The Wikipedia page is at
> <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METATYPE1>, and it explicitly states
> that it can only work with filled outlines rather than pens, and the
> toolchain processes the Bezier outlines from METAPOST.  For an
> autotraced outline, that would make no sense, and there is no mention of
> any tracing tool in the process.  I think that the Type1 versions of the
> ec fonts were created with some kind of autotracing of large bitmaps,
> but the Latin Modern fonts, as far as I know, were created using special
> font sources adapted for Metatype1.  The whole Metatype1 project came
> into being because the Polish programmers did not consider the
> autotraced bitmap fonts to be of sufficient quality.

I was looking at http://metatype.sourceforge.net/ . Your wikipedia
page doesn't host a live link, so I suppose the project died.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen