Re: Fonts for console/fb for various locales: a proposal

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 02:23:02PM +0200, Piotr Meyer wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 11:01:51AM +0200, tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 10:32:40AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> > > I guess noone would object a metafont2wsfont converter tool.
> > > Look at the true type tool Michael mentioned in xsrc/local and do something
> > > similar for metafont.
> > 
> > I have already planed to re-start with the Hershey fonts, for reasons
> > explained in my initial mail and for others and this will be combined
> > with TeX (kerTeX). So there will probably be something in this
> > line, at the end, even if it is only for my own use.
> 
> Sorry for late comment but I would like to suggest mlterm-fb as
> - probably - easiest solution for Your case (if I understood problem
> correctly, of course). mlterm running in framebuffer console is
> capable to use wide range of standard X fonts[1] without hassle.
> 
> If You want to convert fonts to wsfont You may take a look at some
> additional resources. In addition to already mentioned there is also
> my small tool[2], created for my own work for bitmap terminus fonts
> (see [3] for gallery) - it isn't useful for converting vectors, but
> may provide a hints about your own methods of mapping from UTF codes
> or Adobe names to particular code pages (wide range of definitions is
> provided by original terminus package, for my case I made only one,
> for cp437).
> 
> 1 - https://www.mail-archive.com/netbsd-users%netbsd.org@localhost/msg10136.html
> 2 - https://github.com/aniou/bdf2wsfont
> 3 - http://smutek.pl/netbsd/wsfont/terminus/
> 4 - http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/
> 

Thank you for the links. When I will tackle the task I will also provide
short explanations about what different pieces achieve and comparisons
between solutions (for example, I guess, since this has been totally
lost in the huge hay stack of TeXLive, that very few people know about
virtual fonts, even less know how it works; few people can make a link
between METAFONT, freetype or Cairo; few people know how DVI
compares to PDF, or that one can compare METAFONT/TeX/DVI with PS, doing
in three what is done in one with the full fledge PS programming
language---leading after to a drop of a part of PS to keep only PDF in
a wide range of cases; etc.).
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
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