EGA2MF is a utility to generate METAFONT code for 8x14 bitmaps of the type used for EGA screen fonts on machines of the IBM pc/xt/at class. The idea is that you may then produce a font which emulates the appearance of a video display screen with all the crudities appropriate for that medium. There are some trivial changes necessary to make ega2mf work with some other bitmap type (e.g. 8x16 for the VGA or Hercules Plus). This is left as an exercise for the reader. % 4/25/90: a slightly modified version, vga2mf.c, is % now available wherein the necessary changes have been % made for doing VGA 8x16 fonts (at the urging of Dimitri % Vulis). A really improved version would have the font-specific % dimensions abstracted so that a command-line switch could % determine the font type to be used. % ``This is left as an exercise for the reader'' EGA2MF expects the name of an input bitmap file and an output generated code file. If these are not supplied it will ask. EGA2MF does not do checking to verify that the input file truly is a bitmapped font. You may obtain spectacularly worthless METAFONT code by allowing EGA2MF to process, for instance, this README file. The METAFONT code generated will expect to have cmbase and the cmtt10 parameter file available. An early version of EGA2MF was used to produce the font WNPC10 which uses the ``standard'' character set as found in IBM pc-type systems in the USA. This is the same as the code page 437 character set below. Your copy of EGA2MF __may__ be distributed with the following code page bitmaps CP437.EGA United States CP850.EGA Multilingual CP860.EGA Portugal CP863.EGA Canada-French CP865.EGA Norway CP880DV.EGA Dimitri Vulus' Cyrillic ``code page 880'' % 4/25/90: there _may_ also be corresponding *.vga files % suitable for input to vga2mf For METAFONT tinkerers, the essential works are all at the head of the file in s small number of magic-number variables which are used by a macro named crt which draws the individual crt-style dots for the characters. I don't have any doubt that someone could make improvements to the METAFONT code. The C code can probably also use some improvement; but given what it does, how much trouble is it worth if it works at all? [One such improvement of the algorithim is present in the jis2mf program distributed as part of jemtex. See [tex.babel.japanese] for more information. -dh] EGA2MF works on my machines, under both DOS and UNIX, but is provided to you in source so that you may verify that it will do nothing catastrophic _before_ you compile it. Since it is available to you free there is, of course, no warranty of any sort whatsoever, and you use the program entirely at your own risk. % 91/05/24 Brian {Hamilton Kelly}, checking that the programs would work % under VAX/VMS, replaced the line reading FILE *f1,*f2; % in each source with these lines FILE *f1=(FILE *) NULL; FILE *f2=(FILE *) NULL; % (In C, there's no guarantee that automatic variables will have _any_ % particular value, let alone the (FILE *)NULL that was necessary here % with the method the program uses to prompt for missing command-line % arguments. Perhaps he was just lucky with his Unix & DOS :-) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Thomas Ridgeway, Director, Humanities and Arts Computing Center/NorthWest Computing Support Center 35 Thomson Hall H H AA CCCCC CCCCC University of Washington, DR-10 H H A A C C Seattle, WA 98195 HHHHHH AAAAAA C C (206)-543-4218 H H A A C C ridgeway@blackbox.hacc.washington.edu H H A A CCCCC CCCCC - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your comments, suggestions and improvements will be welcome - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -