README

gbdfed 1.6

INTRO

gbdfed is a GTK-based BDF font editor with the following features:

o Multiple fonts can be loaded from the command line. o Multiple fonts can be open at the same time. o Cutting and pasting glyphs between fonts. o Multiple glyph bitmap editors can be open at the same time. o Cutting and pasting between glyph bitmap editors. o Export of XBM files from glyph bitmap editors. o Automatic correction of certain metrics when a font is loaded. o Generation of XLFD font names for fonts without XLFD names. o Update an XLFD font name from the font properties. o Update the font properties from an XLFD font name. o Font property editor. o Font comment editor. o Supports unencoded glyphs (ENCODING of -1). o Display of glyph encodings in octal, decimal, or hex. o Builtin on-line help. o Imports PK/GF fonts. o Imports HBF (Han Bitmap Font) fonts. o Imports Linux console fonts (PSF, CP, and FNT). o Imports Sun console fonts (vfont format). o Imports fonts from the X server. o Imports Windows FON/FNT fonts. o Imports OpenType/TrueType fonts and collections. o Exports PSF fonts. o Exports HEX fonts.

A few things missing from this font editor:

o No way to create space glyphs in monowidth or character cell fonts. o No support for scaling fonts. o Fonts with right-to-left direction (negative widths) not supported. o No way to edit comments appearing in the properties list.

Known problems:

o Selecting the original font editor from the "Windows" menu does not deiconify, set focus, and place it on top like it should. o Deleting glyphs from or inserting glyphs into a font grid do not update the glyph editors if they happen to be editing a deleted glyph or a glyph that moved due to an insertion.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS

gbdfed [options] [font1 font2 ...]

-nc - do not preserve comments -nu - do not preserve unencoded glyphs -nm - do not make metrics corrections -np - do not pad character-cell bitmaps -bp - allow blank pages -ed - do not present the "Really Exit?" dialog -ps n - set default point size -hres n - set default horizontal resolution -vres n - set default vertical resolution -res n - set both default resolutions -sp s - set font spacing ("p" for proportional, "m" for monospace, or "c" for charcell). -eol e - set the default end-of-line char(s) ("u" for Unix, "d" for DOS, or "m" for Mac). -g code - set the initial glyph code (in decimal, hex or octal). -cb base - set the code base for display of glyph codes, can be "octal," "decimal," or "hexadecimal." The first letter of these names work as well.

By default, gbdfed will set its point size to 12, the horizontal and vertical resolution to that of the display (e.g. 90x90 dpi for Sun's), and the font spacing to proportional. Also by default, gbdfed will preserve comments, preserve unencoded glyphs, and make metrics corrections when loading fonts.

COMPILING

To build gbdfed, GTK 2.6 or greater is required. It may be that versions as early as 2.3 will work, but only various versions of 2.7 through 2.20 have been tested.

Optional:

Freetype2 support is optional and can be found at:

http://www.freetype.org

Step 1.

Run the "configure" script to generate the Makefile. By default, the program installs in /usr/local. You can change that by using the --prefix option of the "configure" script.

To disable the File->Import->X Server Font feature, use the --without-x command line option to the "configure" script.

Step 2.

Compile the program

WARNINGS

1. When compiling on HP/UX, the htext.h file has long concatenated strings that require the -H option (noted by W. Chao).

2. Compiling with the gcc -pedantic option complains about strings being too long in the help text file. The help system will be changed in later versions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go to the following people:

Ross Patterson for his HBF code.

der Mouse for his "getbdf" code.

K. Carothers and A. Korobka for their "fnt2bdf" code in Wine.

Mike Stroyan mike_stroyan@fc.hp.com for patches.

Primoz Peterlin primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si for the man page and some changes for building on HP/UX.

Danny Backx u27113@kb.be for the LessTif Imakefile.

Donald Page donaldp@sco.com for patches.

Michal Szymanski msz@sirius.astrouw.edu.pl for problem reports.

Werner Lemberg a7971428@unet.univie.ac.at for pointing out a problem with the HBF code and other problem reports.

William F. Maton wmaton@enterprise.ic.gc.ca for pointing out a problem with padding character cell fonts.

Ivan Nejgebauer ian@uns.ns.ac.yu for reporting a problem with glyph names on imported console fonts.

Solofo solofo@mpi-sb.mpg.de for reporting a problem when creating an XLFD name. The old name was saved in the FONT property and some versions of "mkfontdir" use that instead of the first FONT field. Also for recommending that the Ctrl+F4 accelerator be configurable if it does not suit the user.

Dave Bodenstab imdave@mcs.net for providing a patch for a problem with the HBF code that was not allowing gzipped HBF files to be loaded, and a patch to get rid of some extraneous code. Also a patch to fix some size problems with GlyphEditors.

W. Chao wchao@HRZ.Uni-Bielefeld.DE for providing the Makefile changes needed to compile on HP/UX and pointing out a problem with the builtin documentation.

Andreas Reuter ar205@bonzo.geowiss.nat.tu-bs.de for pointing out a problem with importing TrueType fonts.

Leonard Dickens leonard@saul.hipgraphics.com for providing the Makefile changes needed for IRIX 6.3.

Markus Kuhn Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk for a handful of good suggestions.

Jim Knoble jmknoble@pobox.com for some geometry improvements in some dialogs.

Darren Stuart Embry dsembr01@ox.slug.louisville.edu for the donation of another HP/UX 10.20 X11R6 compilation setup.

Vladimir Volovich vvv@vvv.vsu.ru for pointing out something I forgot to test.

Ben Fry fry@media.mit.edu for IRIX 6.5.2 variables for the Makefile.

J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) jdassen@debian.org for fixing bugs with the PK/GF import feature.

Robert Brady rwb197@ecs.soton.ac.uk for pointing out a problem with the length of _XFREE86_GLYPH_RANGES properties and an Exceed font compiler.

Stefan Monnier monnier@cs.yale.edu for a bug report on highlight thickness of 0.

Humphrey Clerx humphrey.clerx@eurocontrol.be for pointing out some compilation problem on Digit Unix 4.0 and some compilation problems with Traditional C compilers.

Rudolf Cejka cejkar@dcse.fee.vutbr.cz for providing patches to fix problems with grabbing fonts from the X server and alerting me to uninitialized variable warnings.

Baruch Even baruch@ev-en.org for providing a fix for a bug that should have shown up long ago dealing with font properties.

Sergey Vlasov vsu@mivlgu.murom.ru for pointing out a serious problem with naming glyphs from the Unicode Character Database and for providing a fix for a potential buffer overflow problem.

Daniel Neuburger daniel.neuburger@lmco.com for providing a patch that fixes a display problem in the Font Grid.

Pierre HANSER Pierre.Hanser@sxb.bsf.alcatel.fr for a patch to fix a problem loading font names that are not NULL terminated from the end of FON/FNT files.

Patrick Hagglund patrik.hagglund@bredband.net for providing the patches to use FreeType 2.

James Cloos cloos@jhcloos.com for finding problems with gbdfed.

Ming Hua minghua@rice.edu for locating a problem with editing glyphs.

Sergio Martins smartins@students.dei.uc.pt for finding a typo and several dialog related bugs.

Viktor Urban viktor@icc-atcsolutions.com for locating a problem when saving and moving to the next or previous glyph.

Jiri "BlueBear" Dluhos modry.medved@seznam.cz for producing crash fixes on 64-bit machines.

Jan Engelhardt jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de for providing an improvement on the help text, a missing prototype, and an improvement in Makefile.in.

Daniel Richard G. skunk@iSKUNK.ORG for diagnosing problems on 64-bit architectures.

Baruch Even baruch@ev-en.org for diagnosing problems on 64-bit architectures.

Ming Hua minghua.debian@gmail.com for pointing out a warning about testing a NULL region.

Ryan Hill dirtyepic@gentoo.org for pointing out a crashing problem with filename filters when the import dialog was popped up multiple times.

Don Knuth for reporting problems with the documentation and a highlighting problem (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gbdfed/+bug/172836).

Tim Allen screwtape@froup.com for reporting an obscure bug with glyph spacing which led to fixing another spacing related bug. Also for the idea of preserving device width offsets.

Daniel Quarras dqarras@yahoo.com for discovering that deleting PSF unicode map entries was being ignored.

Bertrand Janin tamentis@neopulsar.org for adding glyph navigation buttons to the GlyphEditors.

Peter Volkov pva@gentoo.org for fixing a name collision with Glib 2.10.

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com for the configuration addition that fixes a problem with implicit dynamic linking that showed up with newer versions of gcc.

AUTHOR

Mark Leisher mleisher@gmail.com 15 April 2010