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

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> 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 This looks very outdated, and it seems to use autotrace.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.

Looks like I sloppily considered Metatype and Metatype1 the same
project.  The download README is from 2009, and there have been a number
of fonts produced using it.
<URL:http://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/metatype1>

The Polish TeX programmer team is continuing to create fonts using this
tool as far as I know, though few others have picked it up.

The TeX Gyre project
<URL:http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/index_html> uses
it according to its documentation, and works with roundtrips from
outline PostScript fonts to Metatype1, editing and supplementing
(diacritics, for one thing) and going back to Type1.

-- 
David Kastrup