====== Making outline fonts from MetaFont ======


''[[https://sourceforge.net/projects/textrace/|TeXtrace]]'', originally developed by  Péter Szabó,
is a [[https://pts.50.hu/textrace/|bundle of Unix scripts]] that use  Martin Weber's freeware
boundary tracing package ''[[http://autotrace.sourceforge.net|autotrace]]''
to  generate Type 1 outline fonts from MetaFont bitmap font outputs.
The result is unlikely ever to be of the quality of the commercially-produced Type 1 font,
but there's always the [[http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/|FontForge]] font
editor to tidy things.  Whatever, there remain fonts which many people find useful
and which fail to attract the paid experts, and auto-tracing is providing a useful service here.
Notable sets of fonts generated using ''TeXtrace'' are Péter Szabó's own
EC/TC font set ''tt2001'' and Vladimir Volovich's CM-Super set,
which covers the EC, TC, and the Cyrillic LH font sets (for details of both of which sets,
see [[5_fichiers:fontes:fontes_t1_8bits|"8-bit" type 1 fonts]]).

Another system, which arrived slightly later, is 
''[[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/|mftrace]]'':
this is a small Python program that does the same job.
''Mftrace'' may use either ''autotrace'' (like ''TeXtrace'')
or Peter Selinger's ''[[http://potrace.sourceforge.net|potrace]]''
to produce the initial outlines to process.  ''Mftrace'' is said to be
more flexible, and easier to use, than is ''TeXtrace'', but both systems
are increasingly being used to provide Type 1 fonts to the public domain.

The ''MetaType1'' system aims to use MetaFont font sources, by way
of MetaPost and a bunch of scripts and so on, to produce high-quality
Type 1 fonts.  The first results, the  [[https://ctan.org/pkg/lm|Latin Modern fonts]],
are now well-established, and a bunch of existing designs have been reworked
in MetaType1 format.

[[ctanpkg>Mf2pt1|Mf2pt1]] is another translator of MetaFont font sources by way of
MetaPost; in addition, available, [[ctanpkg>mf2pt1|mf2pt1]] will use
[[http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/|Fontforge]] (if it's
available) to auto-hint the result of its conversion
([[ctanpkg>Mf2pt1|Mf2pt1]] is also written in ''perl'').


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//Source:// [[faquk>FAQ-textrace|Making outline fonts from MetaFont]]

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