1. Introduction

This manual corresponds to version 0.7 of the GNU font utilities.

You can manipulate fonts in various ways using the utilities: conversion of a scanned image to a bitmap font, hand-editing of bitmaps, conversion of a bitmap font to an outline font, and more. More generally, you can start with a scanned image of artwork and work your way through to a finished font with side bearings, accented characters, ligatures, and so on.

The font formats recognized by these programs are primarily those used by the (freely available) TeX typesetting system developed by Donald E. Knuth from 1977--1990. The filenames, font searching, and other aspects of their usage are also based on TeX. They also support output of PostScript Type 1 fonts.

Some of this software was originally written as part of the research program in digital typography at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, directed by Robert A. Morris. The staff at UMB, Rick Martin in particular, has been kind enough to let us to continue to use their computers, despite our completing the Master's program there in 1989.