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I will not be responding to bug reports/feature requests/etc. between 28 June and 9 July.

PfaEdit -- A postscript font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed and bitmap (bdf) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another.

Contents

I have no one to do QA for me except users on the net, so this is essentially beta software. Expect to find bugs. Please let me know when you do.

Binary distributions:

If you want to do autotracing around character images you should also download Martin Weber's autotrace program. (there's a new version as of Dec 2001)

If you want to edit CID keyed fonts you probably need these character set descriptions. (These were last updated 6-Mar-2002)

Source distribution

You can download a source RPM: Version: 26-June-2002
Or you can download the entire source tree in one .tgz file: Version 27-June-2002

If you want to do autotracing around character images you should also download Martin Weber's autotrace program.(there's a new version as of Dec 2001)

If you want to edit CID keyed fonts you need these character set descriptions. (These were last updated 6-Mar-2002)

With the appropriate libraries, PfaEdit can import png, tiff, and gif images to act as character backgrounds for tracing purposes (PfaEdit can import bmp and xbm formats without external libraries). With the freetype library PfaEdit will do a better job making bitmap characters for you. None is required for the proper compilation/execution of PfaEdit, if the libraries are not present they will not be used. If your machine doesn't have them and you want them they are available from:

Normally PfaEdit depends on the X11 windowing system, but if you are just interested in the scripting engine (with no user interface), it may be built on systems without X (the configure script should figure this out).

PfaEdit has been ported to the following systems (at some point in its life)

If you are editing CID keyed fonts you should pull down the following file

You might also want to pull down some unicode bitmap fonts that pfaedit uses

Documentation

All the documentation files in this directory bundled up into one tgz file 26-June-2002.
If you do the following then PfaEdit will find the docs for you when you press F1 (ie. PfaEdit it will look in /usr/share/doc/pfaedit before it looks on the web): 

$ mkdir -p /usr/share/doc/pfaedit
$ cd /usr/share/doc/pfaedit
$ gunzip pfaedit_htdocs-*.tgz
$ tar xf pfaedit_htdocs-*.tar
$ rm pfaedit_htdocs-*.tar

Or you can download an rpm which should install them properly for you 8-Feb-2002.

Or you can just browse the docs online. (Always current)

License

Copyright © 2000,2001,2002 by George Williams

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Changes (Enhancements & Bug Fixes)

Lacks

PfaEdit is by no means complete. And probably doesn't work very well. Be prepared to save frequently and always work on a copy of the original.

Bugs

Installing it

The executable tarball contains the pfaedit executable and a man page. Put it wherever you'd like.

The build script will do an install to /usr/local/bin if you want it to.

Running it

$ pfaedit font.pfa font2.pfb font3.sfd font4.ttf font5.otf font6.gsf font7.bdf
will start pfaedit looking at the fonts you specify on the command line. It can read either pfb or pfa fonts, and some ps fonts (type 0 fonts based on a type 1 dictionary) as well as truetype fonts, non-CID open type fonts and bitmap fonts.
$ pfaedit -new
will cause pfaedit to create a new font (in iso-8859-1 encoding)
$ pfaedit
will open up a file picker dialog and allow you to browse till you've found a font file (or have created a new one).

Reporting bugs...

I'm sure you'll find some. If you can isolate it and come up with a reproduceable minimal case, that would be great. The executable has symbols in it so if you run it in gdb you should be able to get a stack trace... Do what you can.

gww@silcom.com

How else you can help.

Acknowledgements

The sample text in File->Print comes from many sources.

The following people have helped debug pfaedit. Many thanks!

PfaEdit was inspired by AltSys's Fontographer now placed in graceful retirement by MacroMedia.

Font File Formats

Other font links

Unicode

Other Encodings

Other Tools

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