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After installing GIMP, I was dissapointed that all the fonts kept
appearing blocky and jaggered (I hadn't set up X properly)
Fortunately X11 can use Adobe Type 1 fonts (both .pfb and .pfa). There
are a large amount of Type 1 fonts available on the Net, but never the
font you want, which is always in another format... It seems that every
man and his dog have True Type (.ttf) Fonts but very few have Type 1. So
I went looking for a converter. I searched the Web, I searched Deja-News.
But every hit pointed to a commercial peice of software (for Mac or
Windows).
I did find a program called ttf2pfa (by Andrew Weeks) which will convert a
True Type Font to an Adobe Type 3 font, but X doesn't like type 3 fonts.
So I continued searching for either ttf to pfa or type 3 to type 1.
I spoke to Andrew Weeks and asked if he was writing a program to
produce type 1 fonts. Andrew pointed me to the type 1 specification and
the True Type specification, and I started learning about the Type 1
fonts.
Unfortunately the Type 1 specification was full of references to
the Postscript Language Reference Manual, which was only available in book
format. The chapter on creating the Type 1 outline was full of
references: rlineto behaves the same as the rlineto
postscript command or dx1 dy1 dx2 dy2 dx3 dy3 rrcurveto
behaves the same as dx1 dy1 (dx1+dx2)(dy1+dy2) (dx1+dx2+dx3)
(dy1+dy2+dy3) rcurveto I needed more help.
Just browsing around News one day I noticed a signature which said: * NeXTSTEP, IRIX, Linux, BeOS & PostScript Guy
So I asked Frank M. Siegert (owner of the signature) about converting type 3 fonts to
type 1, then swapped a number of emails regarding the type 1 commands compared with
the type 3 commands that ttf2pfa produced. And Eventually I got a valid
type 1 font.
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