Although the specifications for both Type 1 font outlines and BDF (Bitmap Distribution Format) bitmaps were developed by Adobe, Inc. I was not able to find any direct Type 1 to BDF converter freely available. What I did find was Piet Tutelaers' package ps2pk, which rendered TeX packed bitmaps from Type 1 outlines, and pktobdf, which converted TeX packed bitmaps into BDF. The latter needed some modifications (most notably, TeX encoding vector was replaced by the one for ISO 8859-2 encoding).
This process produced bitmaps which were near-perfect at 18
and 24 pt, but looked rather crude in 8 pt at 75 dpi, so some
manual retouching was needed, which was done by
xfed. On the way, minor bugs in xfed
were fixed (the most important perhaps the in
output.c - hex-encoded bitmaps must be padded on the
right with zeroes to the nearest byte (that is, the number of hex
chars must always be even, never odd).
Another problem encountered was that with the exception of IBM Courier, no other freely available high quality Type 1 fonts provided all the neccessary glyphs used in ISO 8859-2.
Created 16 Feb 1996 by P. Peterlin
Last update 12 Apr 1996 (P. Peterlin)
Back to ISO 8859-2 Resources