gbdfed 1.6

INTRO
-----

gbdfed is a GTK-based BDF font editor with the following features:

  o  Multiple fonts can be loaded from the command line.
  o  Multiple fonts can be open at the same time.
  o  Cutting and pasting glyphs between fonts.
  o  Multiple glyph bitmap editors can be open at the same time.
  o  Cutting and pasting between glyph bitmap editors.
  o  Export of XBM files from glyph bitmap editors.
  o  Automatic correction of certain metrics when a font is loaded.
  o  Generation of XLFD font names for fonts without XLFD names.
  o  Update an XLFD font name from the font properties.
  o  Update the font properties from an XLFD font name.
  o  Font property editor.
  o  Font comment editor.
  o  Supports unencoded glyphs (ENCODING of -1).
  o  Display of glyph encodings in octal, decimal, or hex.
  o  Builtin on-line help.
  o  Imports PK/GF fonts.
  o  Imports HBF (Han Bitmap Font) fonts.
  o  Imports Linux console fonts (PSF, CP, and FNT).
  o  Imports Sun console fonts (vfont format).
  o  Imports fonts from the X server.
  o  Imports Windows FON/FNT fonts.
  o  Imports OpenType/TrueType fonts and collections.
  o  Exports PSF fonts.
  o  Exports HEX fonts.

A few things missing from this font editor:

  o  No way to create space glyphs in monowidth or character cell fonts.
  o  No support for scaling fonts.
  o  Fonts with right-to-left direction (negative widths) not supported.
  o  No way to edit comments appearing in the properties list.

Known problems:

  o  Selecting the original font editor from the "Windows" menu does not
     deiconify, set focus, and place it on top like it should.
  o  Deleting glyphs from or inserting glyphs into a font grid do not update
     the glyph editors if they happen to be editing a deleted glyph or a glyph
     that moved due to an insertion.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS
--------------------
  gbdfed [options] [font1 font2 ...]

  -nc      - do not preserve comments
  -nu      - do not preserve unencoded glyphs
  -nm      - do not make metrics corrections
  -np      - do not pad character-cell bitmaps
  -bp      - allow blank pages
  -ed      - do not present the "Really Exit?" dialog
  -ps n    - set default point size
  -hres n  - set default horizontal resolution
  -vres n  - set default vertical resolution
  -res n   - set both default resolutions
  -sp s    - set font spacing ("p" for proportional, "m" for monospace,
             or "c" for charcell).
  -eol e   - set the default end-of-line char(s) ("u" for Unix, "d" for DOS,
             or "m" for Mac).
  -g code  - set the initial glyph code (in decimal, hex or octal).
  -cb base - set the code base for display of glyph codes, can be "octal,"
             "decimal," or "hexadecimal." The first letter of these names
             work as well.

  By default, gbdfed will set its point size to 12, the horizontal and
  vertical resolution to that of the display (e.g. 90x90 dpi for Sun's), and
  the font spacing to proportional.  Also by default, gbdfed will preserve
  comments, preserve unencoded glyphs, and make metrics corrections when
  loading fonts.

COMPILING
---------

To build gbdfed, GTK 2.6 or greater is required. It may be that versions as
early as 2.3 will work, but only various versions of 2.7 through 2.20 have been
tested.

Optional:

  Freetype2 support is optional and can be found at:

    http://www.freetype.org

Step 1.

  Run the "configure" script to generate the Makefile. By default, the program
  installs in /usr/local. You can change that by using the --prefix option of
  the "configure" script.

  To disable the File->Import->X Server Font feature, use the --without-x
  command line option to the "configure" script.

Step 2.

  Compile the program

WARNINGS
--------

1. When compiling on HP/UX, the htext.h file has long concatenated strings that
   require the -H option (noted by W. Chao).

2. Compiling with the gcc -pedantic option complains about strings being too
   long in the help text file. The help system will be changed in later
   versions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
----------------

Thanks go to the following people:

  Ross Patterson for his HBF code.

  der Mouse for his "getbdf" code.

  K. Carothers and A. Korobka for their "fnt2bdf" code in Wine.

  Mike Stroyan <[email protected]> for patches.

  Primoz Peterlin <[email protected]> for the man page and
  some changes for building on HP/UX.

  Danny Backx <[email protected]> for the LessTif Imakefile.

  Donald Page <[email protected]> for patches.

  Michal Szymanski <[email protected]> for problem reports.

  Werner Lemberg <[email protected]> for pointing out a problem
  with the HBF code and other problem reports.

  William F. Maton <[email protected]> for pointing out a
  problem with padding character cell fonts.

  Ivan Nejgebauer <[email protected]> for reporting a problem with glyph
  names on imported console fonts.

  Solofo <[email protected]> for reporting a problem when creating an
  XLFD name.  The old name was saved in the FONT property and some
  versions of "mkfontdir" use that instead of the first FONT field.  Also
  for recommending that the Ctrl+F4 accelerator be configurable if
  it does not suit the user.

  Dave Bodenstab <[email protected]> for providing a patch for a problem
  with the HBF code that was not allowing gzipped HBF files to be
  loaded, and a patch to get rid of some extraneous code.  Also a patch to fix
  some size problems with GlyphEditors.

  W. Chao <[email protected]> for providing the Makefile changes
  needed to compile on HP/UX and pointing out a problem with the builtin
  documentation.

  Andreas Reuter <[email protected]> for pointing out a problem
  with importing TrueType fonts.

  Leonard Dickens <[email protected]> for providing the Makefile
  changes needed for IRIX 6.3.

  Markus Kuhn <[email protected]> for a handful of good suggestions.

  Jim Knoble <[email protected]> for some geometry improvements in some
  dialogs.

  Darren Stuart Embry <[email protected]> for the donation of
  another HP/UX 10.20 X11R6 compilation setup.

  Vladimir Volovich <[email protected]> for pointing out something I forgot to
  test.

  Ben Fry <[email protected]> for IRIX 6.5.2 variables for the Makefile.

  J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) <[email protected]> for fixing bugs with the PK/GF
  import feature.

  Robert Brady <[email protected]> for pointing out a problem with the
  length of _XFREE86_GLYPH_RANGES properties and an Exceed font compiler.

  Stefan Monnier <[email protected]> for a bug report on highlight thickness
  of 0.

  Humphrey Clerx <[email protected]> for pointing out some
  compilation problem on Digit Unix 4.0 and some compilation problems with
  Traditional C compilers.

  Rudolf Cejka <[email protected]> for providing patches to fix
  problems with grabbing fonts from the X server and alerting me to
  uninitialized variable warnings.

  Baruch Even <[email protected]> for providing a fix for a bug that should
  have shown up long ago dealing with font properties.

  Sergey Vlasov <[email protected]> for pointing out a serious problem with
  naming glyphs from the Unicode Character Database and for providing a fix
  for a potential buffer overflow problem.

  Daniel Neuburger <[email protected]> for providing a patch that
  fixes a display problem in the Font Grid.

  Pierre HANSER <[email protected]> for a patch to fix a
  problem loading font names that are not NULL terminated from the end of
  FON/FNT files.

  Patrick Hagglund <[email protected]> for providing the patches to
  use FreeType 2.

  James Cloos <[email protected]> for finding problems with gbdfed.

  Ming Hua <[email protected]> for locating a problem with editing glyphs.

  Sergio Martins <[email protected]> for finding a typo and several
  dialog related bugs.

  Viktor Urban <[email protected]> for locating a problem when
  saving and moving to the next or previous glyph.

  Jiri "BlueBear" Dluhos <[email protected]> for producing crash fixes on
  64-bit machines.

  Jan Engelhardt <[email protected]> for providing an improvement on the
  help text, a missing prototype, and an improvement in Makefile.in.

  Daniel Richard G. <[email protected]> for diagnosing problems on 64-bit
  architectures.

  Baruch Even <[email protected]> for diagnosing problems on 64-bit
  architectures.

  Ming Hua <[email protected]> for pointing out a warning about testing
  a NULL region.

  Ryan Hill <[email protected]> for pointing out a crashing problem with
  filename filters when the import dialog was popped up multiple times.

  Don Knuth for reporting problems with the documentation and a highlighting
  problem (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gbdfed/+bug/172836).

  Tim Allen <[email protected]> for reporting an obscure bug with glyph
  spacing which led to fixing another spacing related bug. Also for the idea
  of preserving device width offsets.

  Daniel Quarras <[email protected]> for discovering that deleting PSF
  unicode map entries was being ignored.

  Bertrand Janin <[email protected]> for adding glyph navigation buttons
  to the GlyphEditors.

  Peter Volkov <[email protected]> for fixing a name collision with Glib 2.10.

  Tom "spot" Callaway <[email protected]> for the configuration addition
  that fixes a problem with implicit dynamic linking that showed up with newer
  versions of gcc.

AUTHOR
------
  Mark Leisher <[email protected]>
  15 April 2010