🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <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.
|> 
|> MetaFont can clip pictures, and output each clipping as a separate
|> character in the picture font.
|> 
|> GFtoPK can then process each character.
|> 
|> Also one needs somehow to keep track of the clipping and to write TeX
|> instructions for the tiling process.  Either a C (or other language)
|> program, as with BM2FONT, or a set of TeX macros, as with mfpic, may
|> be suitable for this.
|> 
|> A perhaps far-fetched idea is to use the "extensible character" idea,
|> and so use MetaFont to write out the arrangement of the "tiles" in the
|> TFM file.  I must confess I haven't investigated this, and my copy of
|> the METAFONTbook is of 1986 vintage, so MF 2.71 may be more powerful
|> in this respect than MF 1.0 was.
|> 
|> Any remarks, or advice?
|> 
|> Geoffrey Tobin

This is very interesting. According to the METAFONT book (at least the
way I read it), the maximal legal character width, height and depth is
2048 pt# each, which ought to allow you to define characters of
considerable size, definitely as large as a single page. This is also
one of the requirements of a proposed driver standard which I read
about in (I think) an old TeXhax digest.

I dabble a bit in METAFONT for graphics, and every once in a while I
have occasion to design a large "font". The largest I designed was
four by five inches large, and I had to chop it into five *logical*
pieces, all of the same physical size, which I then superimposed
using boxes of dimension 0pt in TeX.

It seems to me that gftopk should be able to handle all fonts you
can generate in METAFONT, but this is not the case. Worse, it seems
that there is at the moment only one driver out there that can
correctly use these oversized fonts: Brian Hamilton Kelly's driver 
for the LN03 family of laser printers. (I would be extremely interested
if anyone can correct me on this point.)

gus gassmann