🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Oct30.101752.19170@lugb.latrobe.edu.au> ecsgrt@luxor.latrobe.edu.au (Geoffrey Tobin) writes:

>On about 9 October, Marek Rybaczuk (whose address is not accessible to
>me) asked whether there is a larger version of GFtoPK, to handle large
>bitmaps.
>
>However, for that method to be portable, one would have to carry the
>change file everywhere, and re-tangle GFtoPK on every machine.
>
>BM2FONT shows another way: split the picture into pieces, then get TeX
>to tile these together.

[...]

>Any remarks, or advice?

You have to be careful about character widths. If you produce a huge
picture in Metafont and convert the bitmap to several characters in a pk
file, if the individual characters are not a whole number of pixels wide
then you are liable to get glitches when sticking them together. (Look at
Matthew Carter's "R" on p207 of the MFbook.) You can put a hack into the
Metafont to make the characters integer-pixel widths, but then the font
is either device-dependent, or optimised to look good at only certain
resolutions. 

Of course, if you're starting with a huge bitmap that you only want to use
at one resolution, you don't have this problem.

Jeremy

---
Jeremy Gibbons <jeremy@cs.aukuni.ac.nz>         tel: +64 9 373 7599
   Department of Computer Science,              fax: +64 9 373 7453
   University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand.