Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!jim From: jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: bdf font creation information Message-ID: <8909261727.AA11176@expo.lcs.mit.edu> Date: 26 Sep 89 17:27:50 GMT References: <38@airgun.wg.waii.com> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: X Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Lines: 26 Where can I find information about the bdf font file language and/or programs that create these fonts for X? A document describing the Bitmap Distribution Format (bdf) can be found on the MIT tape (see below) under the directory doc/bdf/. This is a very simple textual description of the properties and glyphs of characters in a font. BDF files are usually compiled into a binary format which is read and used by the server. The program that does this conversion is usually called "bdftosnf" or "fc". How does one go about getting the MIT X tape? You can contact the X Hotline at 617-258-8330 to order a set of 9 track, 1600bpi magtapes in UNIX tar format. There are various companies that will sell you copies of the tapes on other media. You can also ftp or uucp the distribution from a growing number of machines around the country. I copy of the tape I have seen does not have fonts labeled such as vr-20 and so-forth. You probably weren't looking in the right place: all of the ugly, crufty fonts from R1 and R2 were moved to contrib/fonts/bdf/oldx11/ in R3 (there are also bdf versions of the X10 fonts contrib/fonts/bdf/oldx10/).