fontutils

The GNU font utilities are a set of tools designed to convert scanned type specimen images into outline fonts that can be used with Ghostscript or TeX. Originally developed in the early 1990s, some parts of these tools have been replaced by more advanced programs. However, certain features of the fontutils programs still offer benefits, and others may be useful in specific situations.

Imgrotate, for example, is capable of rotating images 90 degrees, but it is a less efficient version of pnmrotate from netpbm. Imageto, on the other hand, can extract individual characters from a large image, making it still useful. Fontconvert has some potentially helpful features, such as creating a Type 1 font metric (tfm) file from a bitmap. Similarly, charspace allows for non-interactive side bearing specification, which could be beneficial in specific cases. However, fontforge provides better interactive side bearing specification and has an excellent preview window for testing side bearings.

Gsrenderfont is a shell script that converts outline fonts to bitmaps, but its version has been replaced by the scripts in the TeX distributions. Limn, which does the actual conversion from bitmaps to splines, has also been superseded by either autotrace or potrace. Bzrto and bpltobzr, meanwhile, are obsolete processes for conversion from the generic homegrown 'bzr' (Bezier) format output by limn to PostScript Type 1, PostScript Type 3, or Metafont.

Fortunately, a full-featured, free outline font editor called fontforge has been developed by George Williams that can perform all of these functions and more. Finally, xbfe is a bitmap font editor for shapes and metrics, which remains useful in the absence of bitmap editors for any format other than BDF.