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New
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Creates a new font with (by default) ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding. The default
encoding may be changed in the preference dlg.
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Open
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Brings up a file chooser and allows you to open a font in any of the formats
PfaEdit understands.
If you open a truetype font all character hinting (instructions) will be
lost. If the truetype font contains bitmaps then you will be asked if you
want to load some of the bitmaps as well as the outlines.
By default this dialog will display all files with extensions of pfa, pfb,
sfd, ttf, otf, gsf, ttc and bdf (possibly others as PfaEdit comes to support
more formats). If you would also like it to display .ps files then enter
*.{pfa,pfb,ttf,otf,bdf,sfd,ps} and press the Filter button. If you only want
it to display sfd files enter *.sfd and press Filter.
You may select multiple files (by holding down the shift or control keys
when clicking on them), and all selected files will be opened.
PfaEdit can open macbinary resource files containing postscript and truetype
fonts (it does not open bitmap fonts currently)
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Recent
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A submenu showing recently used sfd files.
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Close
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Closes the current window.
If this is a font view and the font has been changed, then it will ask whether
you want to save the font. It will also close any outline character, bitmap
character or metrics views associated with the font.
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Open Outline
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In the font view this will open outline views on all selected characters
(if there are more than 15 or so it will ask whether you really meant to
do that).
In the bitmap view it will open an outline view on the current character.
In the metrics view it will open an outline view on whatever character is
active.
This menu item is always grey in an outline view.
Note: It is possible to have more than one window displaying the same character.
Any editing that occurs in one should be reflected in all.
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Open Bitmap
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In the font view this will open bitmap views on all selected characters (if
there are more than 15 or so it will ask whether you really meant to do that).
If the font view is displaying a bitmap then it will open a bitmap view showing
that pixelsize, otherwise it will pick a pixelsize.
In the outline view it will open a bitmap view on the current character.
It will pick a pointsize.
In the metrics view it will open an outline view on whatever character is
active, as with the font view, if it is displaying a bitmap it will use its
pixelsize, otherwise it will pick a pixelsize.
This menu item is always grey in an bitmap view.
Note: It is possible to have more than one window displaying the same character.
Any editing that occurs in one should be reflected in all.
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Open Metrics
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In the font view it will open a metrics view displaying all selected characters.
The new metrics view will display whatever the font view displays (outline
or bitmap).
In the outline view it will open a metrics view displaying the current character.
The display will be an outline.
In the bitmap view it will open a metrics view displaying the current character.
The display will be a bitmap in the current size.
This menu item is always grey in the metrics view.
It is possible to have more than one metrics view open at a time.
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Save
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Saves the current file. If it is associated with a spline font database it
will be saved there and a backup file will be created. If it is a new font,
or if the font has been read from a postscript font file, then a Save As
dialog will pop up.
If you are editing a font "Ambrosia.sfd" then the backup file will be called
"Ambrosia~.sfd".
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Save As...
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Allows you to give a new name to the current spline font database. Pops up
a file picker.
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Save All
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Saves all changed fonts. If any have not been named, it will pop up a Save
As file picker for that font.
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Generate Fonts...
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This generates font files, both outline and bitmap. You may choose not to
generate either, you may generate an afm file or a pfm file, you may select
the type of postscript output, you may select which pixelsizes of bitmap
to generate.
The outline types are:
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PostScript Type1 font, binary format (a .pfb file, this may be used by adobe
type manager or by the new x font server)
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PostScript Type1 font, ascii format (a .pfa file, this is used by printers)
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PostScript Type1 font, macbinary format (a postscript font wrapped up in
a set of mac resources wrapped up in a macbinary file, to be copied to a
mac, unmacbinaried, and installed there)
If you are on a mac then a resource fork will be generated directly, macbinary
will not be used.
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PostScript Type3 font (a .ps font, this is also used by printers and is not
encrypted)
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PostScript Type0 font, this is only available if you have a font encoded
with Unicode or one of the CJK encodings. Type0 fonts can have up to 65536
characters in them (as opposed to 256 for Type1s and Type3s).
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PostScript CID font, this is only available if your font is a
CID font. This produces a font in the old Type1
CID format. You probably want to use the OpenType CID format...
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True Type. The instructions (hinting) are probably not very good. No diagonal
stems are hinted. Instructing is based on the hints used for postscript,
with some additional work done for serifs, and some recognition that all
characters of approximately the same height should have the same height at
small pointsizes (equivalent to PostScript's BlueValues).
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True Type Symbol. Same as True Type, except it uses the 1 byte encoding given
in the font. This is important on windows as symbol and dingbat encodings
often include characters (in the range 0x80-0x9f) which aren't mapped in
normal encodings. It is important on the Mac because I do not generate the
correct encoding tables for any script other than MacRoman, so if you want
a MacCyrillic font use this mode.
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True Type macbinary format, a truetype font wrapped up in a mac resource,
wrapped up in a macbinary file. Designed to be used for a mac.
If you are on a mac, then a file with a resource fork will be generated directly
(macbinary will not be used).
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True Type dfont format, a truetype font wrapped up in a mac dfont (data fork
resource file). Mac OS/X font.
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Open Type. Officially Open Type includes True Type, but Open Type True Type
fonts are no different from plain True Type fonts, so they might as well
just be called True Type. So by Open Type I mean Open Type with a CFF Postscript
Type 2 font inside it.
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Open Type dfont format, an open type font wrapped up in a mac dfont (data
fork resource file). Mac OS/X font.
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Open Type CID, This is only available if your font is a
CID font. It procudes an OpenType CID-keyed font.
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None
The bitmap types are:
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BDF -- The internal bitmap fonts will be saved in bdf format. You may only
select sizes for which you have already generated fonts
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GDF -- Greymap Distribution Format, used for saving anti-aliased fonts. The
format is exactly the same as BDF except for one extra header "BITSPERPIXEL"
which may have a value of 2, 4 or 8. You may pick any size you like (within
reason), and an anti-aliased font will be generated for that size. As far
as I know this is a totally useless format since I just created it, but I
thought it a kind of neat idea.
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In TTF (MS) -- Store the bitmap fonts inside the ttf file using the microsoft
tables.
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In TTF (Apple) -- Store the bitmap fonts inside the ttf file using the apple
tables (I wish they were consistent!)
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In sfnt (dfont) -- Only available if no outline font is generated. Apple
allows bitmaps to be stored within a truetype file (sfnt) even if there is
no outline font. So this generates a ttf file that just contains bitmaps
and wraps it up in a dfont.
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NFNT (MacBin) -- Converts the bitmap fonts into Macintosh NFNT resources
and wraps them up in a mac binary file.
NFNT (Resource) -- On a mac the NFNT font will be generated in a resource
fork directly.
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NFNT (dfont) -- Converts the bitmap fonts into Macintosh NFNT resources and
stores them in a mac (OS/X) dfont file.
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None
TTF (and Open Type) fonts are usually generated in Unicode encoding, there
will also be a tiny macintosh encoding of whatever bits of MacRoman fit in
the first 256 glyphs (and a macintosh copy of the unicode encoding) -- the
exceptions are: symbol fonts will use the symbol encoding, KSC5601 and Wansung
fonts will use Wansung, Johab fonts will use johab, JIS208 and SJIS fonts
will use SJIS, Big5 will use big5 encoding. Fonts with a "Full Unicode" encoding
will have both a 2 byte unicode encoding table and a 4 byte table. OpenType
CID keyed fonts will be saved with Unicode encoding.
Postscript fonts are generated in whatever encoding the font is using (except
if you take a two byte encoding and generate a Type1 font (rather than a
Type0) then only the first few characters will be encoded). Type0 does not
support a full Unicode (4 byte) encoding.
PS CID (and OpenType CID in the CFF) are saved with no encoding. The encodings
live in seperate cmap files which are available from
adobe
(and perhaps other font vendors).
If you save a CID font with a format other than PS CID or OpenType CID, then
only the currenly displayed subfont will be saved, with the current meaningless
character ordering (I suppose this is useful if you wish to extract a sub-font
from a CID font).
TTF (and OpenType) fonts will produce vertical metrics tables if the font
has vertical metrics enabled. Postscript encodings will not produce Metrics2
dictionaries (If someone actually wants this let me know, it can be done,
but I get the impression that nobody uses this any more).
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Revert
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Rereads the font from the file on the disk. All changes are lost.
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Export...
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In the Outline view this allows you to export the splines that make up the
character into an encapsulated postscript (.eps) file or a file in xfig format
(.fig -- the conversion to fig format is not the best). You may also have
the character rasterized and output in either .xbm or .bmp formats (PfaEdit
will prompt you for a pixelsize. bmp also allows you to generate an anti-aliased
image, and you will be prompted for bits per pixel. 1 bit per pixel is a
bitmap).
In the Bitmap view this allows you to export the current character as either
a .xbm or a .bmp (always as a bitmap) file.
This menu item is not available in the Font or Metrics Views.
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Import...
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In the Font View this allows you to import one or several bitmap fonts (from
a .bdf file or a ttf/otf/ttc file, TeX pk file, or an X11 .pcf file) and
merge it into the list of bitmap sizes stored in the database. You may also
load one bitmap font into the backgrounds of the outline characters (So "A"
from the bitmap font goes into the background of the "A" outline character),
this is to make tracing characters easier. Be careful, you need to load a
big bitmap for autotrace to be useful.
NOTE: PfaEdit is
unable to read an encoding from pk files, you will may need to set it with
"Force Encoding" after you've loaded the pk file.
You may also load images into the character backgrounds. There are two ways
to do this, you may either select several image files and they will be loaded
consecutively into selected characters, or you may select an image template
and all images whose filename match that template will be loaded into the
backgrounds of the appropriate characters. Image templates look like "uni*.png"
or "enc*.gif" or "cid*.tiff". You select the template by selecting a filename
which matches that template-- So if you select "uni1100.gif" then all image
files which start with "uni" and end with ".gif" and contain a valid unicode
number will be loaded and placed in the appropriate place. Files named "enc*"
or "cid*" are handled similarly except that they specify the current encoding
(and the number must be in decimal rather than hex).
Finally you may load an encapsulated postscript file (or rather the sub-set
of postscript that PfaEdit understands) into the foreground of characters.
As with images above this may either import depending on the selection or
a template.
In the Outline View this allows you to import an image into the background,
or import eps or fig files into the foreground (the xfig conversion is really
bad, the eps conversion is very limitted).
In the Bitmap View this allows you to import a bitmap image into the character.
This menu item is not available in the Metrics View
In the font view you may select multiple files (by holding down the shift
or control keys when clicking on them), and all selected bitmap fonts will
be imported into the sfd.
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Merge Kern Info...
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Only available in the font view window. This command will allow you to search
for an afm (or tfm) file containing kerning pairs for the specified font.
In many cases it will not be needed because when PfaEdit opens a .pfa or
.pfb font it will automagically search for an appropriate .afm file in the
same place. But sometimes afm files are stored in other directories. And
sometimes you want to import information from TeX.
NOTE: PfaEdit is
unable to read an encoding from tfm files, it is your responsibility to ensure
that the encoding of your font matches that of the tfm file BEFORE
merging kerning information. This is unfortunate, sorry.
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Print...
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Not available in the bitmap view. Allows you to print out all the characters
in the font, a text sample of the font, or specific characters at a very
large scale.
See the section on printing for more information.
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Execute Script...
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Only in the font view. Brings up a dlg and allows you to enter a
script, which could be just calling a prewritten
script file. There is a [Call] button in the dlg to help you locate any such
files. The default extension is "*.pe" (postscript edit) but you can change
that with the [Filter] button if you use something else.
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Script Menu
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Only in the font view. You may define up to 10
scripts that you want to execute frequently
and place them in this menu. The scripts may also be invoked by short cut
with the first one being invoked by Control-Meta(Alt)-1, the second
Control-Meta-2, and the tenth by Control-Meta-0.
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Preferences...
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This pops up a dialog which allows you to specify
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Whether you want the widths of accented characters to track the width of
the base character (so if you modify the width of A then the width of À
will automagically change, if À is built as a reference to A and a
reference to grave)
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Whether you want left side bearings of accented characters to track the left
side bearing of base characters (so if you shift A left, then the accent
in À will also be shifted left)
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Whether characters should be automagically hinted before a bitmap character
is generated (improves the quality of the bitmap)
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The default encoding used to create new fonts. Normally this is ISO 8859-1.
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The default encoding used by the operating system (ie. text that is pasted
into pfaedit will be assumed to be in this encoding).
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The "Foundry Name". Used in generating bdf files (part of the X Windows font
naming convention).
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The base
"XUID".
Should uniquely identify the user's organization. If present then every new
font will be given an XUID generated by appending a random number to the
end of this string (which should consist of a set of numbers separated by
spaces). Whenever a postscript font is generated then this last number will
be incremented by 1.
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Whether constrained motion in the character view should allow motion parallel
to the italic angle as well as horizontal and vertical.
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The amount of space (as a percentage of the em-square) that should be placed
between an accent and the character below it by the Build Accented Character
command.
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Whether to accept Adobe's naming conventions for greek letters, or to make
them a bit more expected.
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The number of em-units an arrow key will move a selected point in the character
view.
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The maximum distance at which pointer motion in the character view will be
snapped to an interesting object (ie. a point, baseline, width line, etc.)
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The menu names and associated script filenames used to build up the Script
Menu in the font view.
A number of things that might be controlled from a preference window are
controlled by X Resources.
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Quit
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Exits the program, prompting you whether to save any changed fonts.