Re: [ft] Creating an [OT]TF font from BDF font

[George Williams]

On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 16:46, Keith Packard wrote:
> Yes, this was my plan. I got side-tracked before I managed to implement
> it though.
> 
> I need this + a utility to regenerate BDF files from the TTF so I can
> validate a lossless round-trip for the existing BDF files. 
> 
> If anyone wants to pick up this little project, I can assure them that
Well I'll certainly make fontforge support a BDF table for otb fonts (ff
can already go bdf->otb->bdf, but it loses the properties -- and then
regenerates the standard ones).

So I presume the BDF table would contain an entry for each strike, and
contain any of the junk between STARTFONT and CHARS?

 I propose the following format for the BDF table:
<uint16> 1 #version
<uint16> n #number of strikes
<uint16> offset to start of string/atom table

n instances of the following structure
<uint16>  #ppem
<uint16>  #offset (from start of BDF table) to information on this
      strike

Strike info would look like:
<uint16> ni #count of non-property information
        FONT, SIZE, FONTBOUNDINGBOX, COMMENT, etc.
<uint16> np #count of property

ni instances of the following structure
<uint16>  #offset from start of string table to atom name
<uint16>  #type of data: 0 => atom, 1 => string, 2 => integer
<u/int16> #offset into string table for atom/string, or the value for
    integers

np instances of the same structure for the properties.

The string table would be a set of NUL terminated ASCII strings.

(BDF fonts are said to be ASCII. I have seen many containing latin1
characters especially the copyright mark ©. I wonder if these should be
converted to UTF-8? or UCS-2?)