Here's a nice task for anybody who does desktop programming. Make a nice UI
for creating Plucker-compatible font packages from fonts supplied by the
user, using fontconv and topalmtext as conversion engines.
Currently, my fontconv and topalmtext utilities
(palmfontconv.sourceforge.net) can together convert half a dozen or more
font formats (anything FreeType 2 supports, plus any Palm-specific format)
into any Palm format (nfnt/NFNT/afnx). The UI would let the user choose the
sources for the fonts Plucker needs in a custom user package (standard,
bold, large, large bold, fixed--I may be missing something), run the
required utilities for converting fonts, and produce a nice little .prc
(e.g., by calling par, which we should be able to bundle, though I don't
remember its license). If we did this really well, we could also call par
to rip apart font packages (or even program binaries) in other formats
(FontHack, Fonts4NX, etc.), and extract the fonts for use in Plucker.
All this can be done by calling already-written tools. It's really just a
matter of making a nice UI. I don't know how to do desktop GUI based
programming (except for a bit of Visual Basic) and I haven't the time. I
think this would be a nice project for someone.
And it would be really easy, once the antialiased font support is in, to
extend the UI to generate antialiased fonts. (Currently topalmtext extracts
antialiased grayscale bitmaps from outline fonts, but I don't have any
utility written yet to convert it to the format I want to use for
antialiased fonts.)
Alex
--
Dr. Alexander R. Pruss
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057-1133 U.S.A.
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
online papers and home page: www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85
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"Philosophiam discimus non ut tantum sciamus, sed ut boni efficiamur."
- Paul of Worczyn (1424)
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