Recently I made a small helping module in FreeType for my research work. This module is mainly responsible for processing a METAFONT input by client application. I used FTVIEW as my client application that takes a METAFONT file to display styled text on screen.
I am using the Mftrace program for converting any METAFONT request into its corresponding Type1 format and then, using the default Type1 driver module, I am processing it and displaying results on screen. It's working fine.
Now what I want is to use the mf
program (the default compiler of METAFONT) instead of Mftrace, to process METAFONT using FreeType. The mf
program takes a .mf
file as input and returns a .tfm
and .gf
file. This .gf
file is then converted using GFtoPK or GFtoDVI into .pk
or .dvi
files respectively and then can be used for displaying.
As FreeType engine doesn't support .gf
and pk
files respectively, I came to know that there is an old library called VFlib that actually supports these two types of files. I have read about VFlib and got to know that it is also a font library that handles many font types and can make glyphs as bitmaps from these different font formats like .ttf
, .pfb
, .gf
, .pk
etc.
As .gf
and .pk
files are actually bitmap font formats (the later is the more compressed file of .gf
file which can be obtained by using programs like GFToPK), my question is: how does this VFlib library actually support .gf
and .pk
formats? What is the main task of this library if a .gf
or .pk
file is input?
vflib
, I find references to a graph matching library that doesn't seem to be the one you're referring to, is it?