15. GSrenderfont

GSrenderfont uses Ghostscript to rasterize a PostScript outline font at a particular point size and resolution. The final result is a bitmap font in PK form, which can be used by any DVI-processing program, unlike the original PostScript font. In particular, you can then use your favorite previewer with TeX documents which use PostScript fonts.

An alternative to using such PK fonts is to use a DVI-to-PostScript translator and then use Ghostscript or Ghostview directly on the result. The PostScript file consumes quite a bit of disk space, however; also, the extra step after running TeX can be quite inconvenient.

An alternative to using GSrenderfont is the standalone C program ps2pk. It does the same job: rasterizing PostScript fonts. It is available by ftp from `ftp.urc.tue.nl'.

Besides Ghostscript, GSrenderfont uses gawk (GNU Awk), the standard Unix utilities tail and wc, the standard TeX utility gftopk, another programs from this distribution (Imageto), and one small program written expressly for it, bbcount. Since this last is of doubtful value for anything but GSrenderfont, it is not documented here. See `gsrenderfont/main.c' if you are interested in what it does.

GSrenderfont has nothing in particular to do with the main task of creating typefaces, but it seemed a small enough job (given the other programs' existence) and widely enough asked for to be worthwhile.

15.1 GSrenderfont usage		Making bitmap fonts from PostScript.
15.2 Invoking GSrenderfont		Command-line options.