would it be possible to create our own greek letters in black board style from the Minion family using Metafont? It is just a matter of adding a vertical bar somewhere... Thanks
2 Answers
bev explained what to do if you have the mf
file. Even if there isn't, you don't actually have to start from scratch. What you should have is a tfm
file that contains the font metrics and a pfb
file containing the actual glyphs (I'm assuming you have postscript type 1 fonts). You can just copy the original tfm
file to blackboard.tfm
; no change in the font metrics. Working with the pfb
is more involved. I did this once and will try to recollect what you need.
First of all, you need to translate the pfb
into something human readable. I did this with t1utils, e.g.
t1disasm minion.pfb > blackboard.raw
In the raw
file you'll find the glyph descriptions, and they contain lots of stuff like vhcurveto
, rrcurveto
and so on. The latter describes a bezier curve, as far as I recollect. You can just experiment with these things to get the hang of it. Make a few edits, and make a new pfb
file with
t1asm blackboard.raw > blackboard.pfb
Then put the tfm
file into texmf/fonts/tfm/blackboard/
and the pfb
file into texmf/fonts/type1/blackboard/
. Now I'm stumbling: You also need to create a font description in an fd
file and a font map entry in a map
file. At the moment I don't find what I did there; I hope someone else can help out.
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:) The last (not) described step seems challenging! the blackboard.raw is a vector or raster format? Thanks– plutonNov 23, 2010 at 13:27
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@pluton: It's some postscript type vector format. When I find time I might find out how the last step works. Nov 23, 2010 at 13:37
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Isn't
.pfa
the ascii format (corresponding to the binary.pfb
)? I fought with fonts once. They won.– TH.Nov 23, 2010 at 14:20 -
@TH.:
pfa
is ascii, but not human readable (unless you're capable of disassembling assembler code using just a hex editor). Nov 23, 2010 at 14:40 -
@Hendrik - thanks for correcting my too hasty assertion. I don't really play with fonts anymore, so I bow to your superior know-how. But this has made me want to dig out my years-ago attempt to metafont-ize non-mf fonts. And for all those horror-stricken good-citizens out there, I'm also a good-citizen too and wasn't trying to steal proprietary fonts. Not my thing.– bevNov 23, 2010 at 19:38
Sure, although it would be difficult if the minion family (which I'm not familiar with) isn't done in metafont (i.e. doesn't already have an 'mf' file.)
If it does have an 'mf' file, you would just have to get the minion 'mf' file, copy it over to 'blackboard.mf' (or whatever) and edit it putting your changes in for each glyph. Then you would compile it, install it, and use it like any other font.
Metafont has a bad rep, but it's actually kinda fun. I made a letterhead logo in metafont once that I still use.
It's a little more work (actually a lot more work) if there is not minion.mf. Then you'd have to start from scratch in metafont. This would involve taking each minion glyph, projecting it somehow onto a grid, and use the metafont functions to draw the glyph using the grid/glyph templet as a guide. Then do the compile/install etc. stuff.
You could also write a program to do that for you, which I started to do once, but got busy on other stuff.
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The only metrics that I have or .otf, I think but I can try to play between formats. As for metafont, the created font is in a vector or raster format? That's my fear. Thanks. What about using fontforge?– plutonNov 23, 2010 at 13:26
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Well, the answer is sorta both. MF is basically a mathematical description of how to move a pen (of your description also) to draw things. So the mf file is scalable. But when compiled and installed they are bitmaps. You draw one description for each glyph, then tell it what size you want your compiled fontset to be.– bevNov 23, 2010 at 19:29
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Actually, now that I think about it, I recall that there may be some parameters that change with scaling, i.e. some parts of some glyphs look better in 14.4 pt if the base is relatively thicker, etc.– bevNov 23, 2010 at 19:30
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@bev: I think that what you wrote in your first comment is only half of the truth. More than a decade ago it was standard that you compiled
mf
files to bitmaps, but nowadays it's not really desired anymore to use bitmap fonts. Somehow they managed to make postscript fonts out of themf
files, but I don't know the details. Nov 24, 2010 at 10:38 -
@pluton: If you have
otf
files, then these sourceforge tools might help you to producepfb
files; from those you can also extract thetfm
, I think. Nov 24, 2010 at 14:18