13.6. Sun Fonts   

Here are some fonts types that are used in Sun platform

F3 scalable
F3 fonts are outline font. It has suffix .f3b
PostScript Type 1
PostScript Type 1 fonts are used in the NeWSprint 2.0 and Solaris 2.0 (OpenWindows 3.0.1) releases.

The Sun NeWSprint 2.0 and Solaris 2.0 (OpenWindows 3.0.1) releases are both using type 1 PostScript font type and bitmap font. There are also 57 F3 format fonts supplied with OpenWindows which are fully hinted. The F3 font format has an interpreter, TypeScaler, and is available from Sun machine.

Although the Sun type renderer (TypeScaler) is pretty fast, it's not as fast as loading a bitmap. You can pre-generate bitmap fonts for sizes that you use a lot, and you can also alter and access the font cache parameters. If you have a lot of memory you might want to increase the font cache size.

Sun supports the F3 scalable outline format. These descriptions are stored in .f3b files. The makeafb program is used to create a bitmap font at a particular size which is stored in a ".afb" file, which is an Adobe ASCII format for font bitmaps. X11/NeWS really prefers a binary format though for speed and other reasons, so convertfont is used to "compile" the font into a font binary or .fb file.

Once this is done, X11/NeWS needs to understand the relationship between the .f3b file and all the bitmaps which are based on it. Thus, the bldfamily program makes these correlations and stores the data in the font family or .ff file.

"bldfamily" also builds a global list of all fonts stored in the working directory, writing the results out to the file Families.list. If one wishes to create font aliases, these can be added to the Synonyms.list file by hand and "bldfamily" will then add them to Families.list for you. X11/NeWS uses Families.list to construct the font list it advertises to applications.

To go from F3 to BDF, use "makeafb" to generate a bitmap font in .afb format. Then use one of convertfont's many options to change to this to .bdf format and from there it should be clear.

You can also use F3 fonts with an X11 server, by converting them to a bitmap (X11 bdf format) first. Your OS license restricts use of these fonts on another machine, and unless you have NeWSPrint you shouldn't use them for printing. Having said all that... you can use "makeafb" and "convertfont" to generate bdf files that you can compile with "bdftosnf" or "bdftopcf".

Use "mftobdf" (from the SeeTeX distribution) to convert TeX PK fonts to X11 BDF format, which you can then use with either X11 or OpenWindows.

The various text fonts, such as Lucida Typewriter Sans, are available at 100 dpi, and in fact are scalable under OpenWindows. The glyph fonts used to be bitmaps, which don't scale very well, but starting with OpenWindows 3.2, the OpenLook UI glyph fonts are provided in scalable format as well.


 
Another example of fonts.
Fig. 13.3 : Another example of fonts.