On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 03:20, Maurício wrote:
I've been doing some searching on how to create my own fonts. If possible, I would like to be able to write my own program to at least draw glyphs, even if I have to resort to other tools to describe hinting, kerning and ligatures.
My current knowledge is this. I read that OpenType fonts are actually Type 1 fonts embedded in an archive. So I used this 't1disasm' tool I found after wikipedia article on postscript fonts and used it to decode one of ConTeXt minimal distribution font file into a nice to read text file that looks like the transcript below, and it seems to be something I could easily understand if I find a reference.
I would like to ask you if I'm in the proper direction. There are some issues I can't understand, like how can I make OpenType fonts out of Type 1 fonts when the later are supposed to only contain 256 characters (aren't they?). Or how to understand this text file format so I can write my own glyphs.
Do you think I'm in the right direction. Do you think there's an easier or better way if I want to create fonts without using existing graphical tools?
Without trying to answer your question ... Just a few references that I think you should read: 1.) If you want to understand the code that you have provided at the bottom of your document, start with http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/ and http://www.adobe.com/devnet/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf. Though it's by no means essential to understand. You can just as well use metapost as a programming language and that one could generate glyph shapes in PostScript for you. 2.) It makes sense to read the MetaFont Book to get some nice ideas, or at least browse through it. 3.) As Taco suggested, it's probably best to use fontforge, or maybe MetaType1 (if you can figure out how to use it). Once you create glyph shapes with some tool (that tool could be metapost if you really want to program glyphs), you can use another tool (like fontforge or some commercial program) to create a font out of the shapes. 4.) Be prepared to invest a lot of time ... Mojca