6.1.1 Viewing an image

Typically, the first step in extracting a font from an image is to see exactly what is in the image. (Clearly, this is unnecessary if you already know what your image file contains.)

The simplest way to get a look at the image file, if you have Ghostscript or some other suitable PostScript interpreter, is to convert the image file into an EPSF file with the `-epsf' option. Here is a possible invocation:

imageto -epsf ggmr.img

Here we read an input file `ggmr.img'; the output is `ggmr.eps'. You can then view the EPS file with

gs ggmr.eps

(presuming that `gs' invokes your PostScript interpreter).

If you don't have both a suitable PostScript interpreter and enough disk space to store the EPS file (it uses approximately twice as much disk space as the original image), the above won't work. Instead, to view the image you must make a font with the `-strips' option:

imageto -strips ggmr.img

The output of this will be `ggmrsp.1200gf' (our image having a resolution of 1200 dpi). Although the GF font cannot be conveniently viewed directly, you can use TeX and your favorite DVI processor to look at it, as follows:

fontconvert -tfm ggmrsp.1200 echo ggmrsp | tex strips

This outputs in `strips.dvi', which you can view with your favorite DVI driver. (See section 2.2.1 Archives, for how to obtain the DVI drivers for PostScript and X we recommend.)

`strips.tex' is distributed in the `imageto' directory.