🚀 go-pugleaf

This is a progress report on converting Mac fonts to ATM fonts.  I got no
response to my earlier posting (except for several "me too"s), but I
managed to get some information on GEnie.

1)  There are DOS programs UNSIT, to unpack .sit archives, and REFONT, to
convert the resulting fonts to ATM format.  REFONT is on cica; I can upload
USIT30.ZIP if there is any interest (and if someone tells me how...).

2)  Assuming you have the Mac font in a .sit archive, the following
procedure seems to work:

	a)run UNSIT with the xb flag; it will ask you for dos names for the
	several files it finds.  You should answer no to the query about
	Mac binary headers.  The files you want are the .afm file (a data
	file; more precisely, it's in the data fork of a Mac file) and the
	font outline file, usually identified by LZWF (after unpacking it
	looks like a .pfb file, so you can identify it by LISTing it).  The
	.sit file usually also include a bitmap (which you don't need) and
	a readme file (which you may want to read).  

	b)run REFONT on the resulting files, as per the instructions.

All the difficulty seems to be in the UNSIT process.

3)  The whole process is a bit erratic, and will occasionally fail for
mysterious reasons.  It will certainly not work on type 3 fonts (which have
no .afm file).

Now, all this is less than perfect if you're on the internet, because the
Mac files are usually to be found as .hqx files.  The only program I've
found that handles them is xbin (on simtel), but it splits up the data and
resource forks in such a way that UNSIT can't unpack the resulting files.
Can anybody help?


					Fernando Gouvea
					gouvea@heac.mast.queensu.ca