----- 3/1998 -----

New files:

* bdf2wfnt.c
* bdf2wfnt.1
* COPYRIGHT.bdf2c
* vga16.wfnt

Vga16.wfnt is a VGA line graphics font. You could use it for example for
viewing DOS texts, connecting to (older) PC-BBSes, playing Nethack with
the 'IBMgraphics' option set and so on.  Originally it was 'vga.bdf'
font coming with the GPL Dosemu program.


'bdf2wfnt' is an utility for converting X Window System BDF fonts into W
font format.  It's derived from 'bdf2c' program by Andrew Scherpbier.
The original copyright is in the 'COPYRIGHT.bdf2c' file.  Program is
documented in the 'bdf2wfnt.1' file.


You can save any font your X server uses, as BDF with the 'fstobdf'
program.  'xlsfonts' lists all the fonts server has.  You can browse the
fonts with 'xfontsel' program and use 'xfd' to see the whole charset for
the font.  Note that 'fstobdf' needs font server ('xfs') to be running,
only after that you can use something like this:
	fstobdf -server tcp/localhost:7100 -fn font | bdf2wfnt | fontedit -

Where 'font' is one of the names listed by 'xlsfonts'.  If you'll use
'*' or '?'  wildcards, the first matching font will be used.  'fontedit'
will save the font into current directory with a correct name for W
server.  You can then just copy it into the W font directory for testing
with eg.  'wchars'.  If you're not happy with results, use 'fontedit' to
finetune the font header and data.

Note that most fonts are copyrighted.  Check their licensing before
you'll distribute them further!


I would be interested about programs converting other font types to BDF
or W font format.  For example Wine Windows emulator comes with
'fnt2bdf' program with which you can convert Windows *bitmap* fonts into
BDF.

I'm of course also interested about free fonts.  TeX fonts are free
so a conversion utility for them would be nice.  Then somebody could
port XDvi to W (hint, hint, hint)...


	- Eero

----- TeSche's original notes -----

 You may have already read elsewhere that from W1R2 on I use X11 fonts
instead of the Atari ones - they're nicer, there're more and they're not
copyrighted... at least not that strictly than the Atari fonts. To be fair,
here's a credit:

 These fonts were taken from the X11R6 distribution of the X-Consortium at
MIT in the hope that they'll be useful for this window manager too. You should
be able to get the raw fonts from every site mirroring X11R6.

 Since I don't know about the format they come in the original version (and
because I think my format is *very* quick and memory-saving) I had to convert
them. There's no fully automatic way to do this, but here's a brief description
about what to do if you want to use other X11 fonts than the supplied ones:

 1) Find a machine running X11R6 (earlier version may do well too).

 2) Use 'xfontsel' to select the font you want to use.

 3) Use 'xfd -* <fontname>' to display the font.

 4) Use 'xv' to take a window shot of the xfd window and save it as a pbm-raw
monochome picture.

 5) Run 'fontconv' on all the 'pictures' you've taken with steps 2 - 4.

 Fontconv currently generates fixed width fonts only, allthough there's
theoretical support for proportional fonts in W1R2 - this may come later.
There's one place where you're asked to enter any combination of 'b' or 'i'
chars in fontconv for each font - this is used to set the flags in the font
header indicating if this is a bold or italic (or bolditalic) font. There's
(currently) no way to detect this automatically.

 Since you've got to run through this procedure only once for each font - if
you make everything right - I don't consider this too much trouble at the
moment to do something better. At least it didn't disturb me...

ciao,
TeSche
