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New
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Creates a new font with (by default) ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding. The default
encoding may be changed in the preference dlg.
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Open
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Brings up a file chooser and allows you to open a font in any of the formats
PfaEdit understands.
If you open a truetype font containing bitmaps then you will be asked if
you want to load some of the bitmaps as well as the outlines.
By default this dialog will display all files with extensions of pfa, pfb,
pt3, sfd, ttf, otf, otb, cef, cff, gsf, ttc, svg, ik, mf and bdf (possibly
others as PfaEdit comes to support more formats). If you would also like
it to display .ps files then enter *.{pfa,pfb,ttf,otf,bdf,sfd,ps} and press
the Filter button. If you only want it to display sfd files enter *.sfd and
press Filter.
You may select multiple files (by holding down the shift or control keys
when clicking on them), and all selected files will be opened.
PfaEdit can open macbinary resource files containing postscript and truetype
fonts (it does not open bitmap fonts currently)
PfaEdit does not open Acorn RISC/OS files, but you can use
acorn2sfd to convert them into an sfd
file which PfaEdit can then open.
If you have mf and
autotrace
installed on your machine PfaEdit will process metafont's mf files for
you. But you might want to use pktrace, mftrace or some other standalone
program to do the job.
When importing a type3 font PfaEdit will ask you
a few questions. It shouldn't have to ask these questions, but this is an
imperfect world and PfaEdit an imperfect program. In some rare cases PfaEdit
will crash if it tries to do a remove overlap. The remove overlap functionality
is important for interpretting stroked paths so you really should have it
on. But if a crash happens then, turn it off (and the crash should not repeat,
but some functionality will be lost).
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Recent
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A submenu showing recently used sfd files.
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Close
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Closes the current window.
If this is a font view and the font has been changed, then it will ask whether
you want to save the font. It will also close any outline character, bitmap
character or metrics views associated with the font.
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Open Outline
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In the font view this will open outline views on all selected characters
(if there are more than 15 or so it will ask whether you really meant to
do that).
In the bitmap view it will open an outline view on the current character.
In the metrics view it will open an outline view on whatever character is
active.
This menu item is always grey in an outline view.
Note: It is possible to have more than one window displaying the same character.
Any editing that occurs in one should be reflected in all.
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Open Bitmap
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In the font view this will open bitmap views on all selected characters (if
there are more than 15 or so it will ask whether you really meant to do that).
If the font view is displaying a bitmap then it will open a bitmap view showing
that pixelsize, otherwise it will pick a pixelsize.
In the outline view it will open a bitmap view on the current character.
It will pick a pointsize.
In the metrics view it will open an outline view on whatever character is
active, as with the font view, if it is displaying a bitmap it will use its
pixelsize, otherwise it will pick a pixelsize.
This menu item is always grey in an bitmap view.
Note: It is possible to have more than one window displaying the same character.
Any editing that occurs in one should be reflected in all.
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Open Metrics
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In the font view it will open a metrics view displaying all selected characters
(the order in which you selected those characters is important). The new
metrics view will display whatever the font view displays (outline or bitmap).
In the outline view it will open a metrics view displaying the current character.
The display will be an outline.
In the bitmap view it will open a metrics view displaying the current character.
The display will be a bitmap in the current size.
This menu item is always grey in the metrics view.
It is possible to have more than one metrics view open at a time.
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Save
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Saves the current file. If it is associated with a spline font database it
will be saved there and a backup file will be created. If it is a new font,
or if the font has been read from a postscript font file, then a Save As
dialog will pop up.
If you are editing a font "Ambrosia.sfd" then the backup file will be called
"Ambrosia~.sfd".
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Save As...
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Allows you to give a new name to the current spline font database. Pops up
a file picker.
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Save All
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Saves all changed fonts. If any have not been named, it will pop up a Save
As file picker for that font.
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Generate Fonts...
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This generates font files, both outline and bitmap.
You may choose not to generate either, you may generate an afm file or a
pfm file, you may select the type of postscript output, you may select which
pixelsizes of bitmap to generate. (See that page
for more info)
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Generate Mac Family...
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This is only available if there are multiple fonts open in the same family,
and if the current font is the "Plain" style of that family. It generates
a mac FOND structure containing references to all family members, NFNT, sfnt,
and POST resources for all selected faces. It brings up a
dlg very similar to the Generate fonts dialog,
but one that includes a list of all potential faces for family members.
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Revert
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Rereads the font from the file on the disk. All changes are lost.
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Revert Glyph
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Only available in the font and outline views. Rereads the font from the sfd
file on the disk searching for a character in that file with the same name
as the current character. All changes to this character will be lost (but
if the character has references then any changes made to the characters being
refered to will still be visible), this command may be undone.
So if you have changed the name of the character this command will fail.
If the font did not come from an sfd file this command will fail.
If the font has been reencoded and the character has references this command
may fail.
If you have made a global change to the font (like scaling it to a new em-size)
then the results may not be appropriate.
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Export...
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In the Outline view this allows you to export the splines that make up the
character into an encapsulated postscript (.eps), pdf, svg or xfig format
(.fig -- the conversion to fig format is not the best) file. You may also
have the character rasterized and output in either .xbm or .bmp (or png if
you have that library) formats (PfaEdit will prompt you for a pixelsize.
bmp also allows you to generate an anti-aliased image, and you will be prompted
for bits per pixel. 1 bit per pixel is a bitmap).
In the Bitmap view this allows you to export the current character as either
a .xbm or a .bmp (always as a bitmap) file.
This menu item is not available in the Font or Metrics Views.
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Import...
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In the Font View this allows you to import one or several bitmap fonts (from
a .bdf file or a ttf/otf/ttc file, TeX pk (gf) file, an X11 .pcf file or
a mac dfont) and merge it into the list of bitmap sizes stored in the database.
You may also load one bitmap font into the backgrounds of the outline characters
(So "A" from the bitmap font goes into the background of the "A" outline
character), this is to make tracing characters easier. Be careful, you need
to load a big bitmap for autotrace to be useful.
NOTE: PfaEdit is
unable to read an encoding from pk files, you will may need to set it with
"Force Encoding" after you've loaded the pk file.
You may also load images into the character backgrounds. There are two ways
to do this, you may either select several image files and they will be loaded
consecutively into selected characters, or you may select an image template
and all images whose filename match that template will be loaded into the
backgrounds of the appropriate characters. Image templates look like "uni*.png"
or "enc*.gif" or "cid*.tiff". You select the template by selecting a filename
which matches that template-- So if you select "uni1100.gif" then all image
files which start with "uni" and end with ".gif" and contain a valid unicode
number will be loaded and placed in the appropriate place. Files named "enc*"
or "cid*" are handled similarly except that they specify the current encoding
(and the number must be in decimal rather than hex).
If you are editing a multi-layered font (and
have a version of PfaEdit configured for it) then you can also import an
image into one of the foreground layers.
PfaEdit does best when given bitmap images.
It will grey out the foreground and make the background transparent. It will
also compress them when it stores them in the sfd file. It will handle most
other image formats but does not try to optimize them in anyway. Please use
bitmaps here.
You may load an encapsulated postscript file (or rather the sub-set of postscript
that PfaEdit understands) into the foreground of characters. As with images
above this may import either depending on the selection or a template.
If you have libxml2 on your system then PfaEdit will also be able to import
svg files. As with postscript, only a subset of svg is understood).
In the Outline View this allows you to import an image into the background
(see the above remark about bitmaps, or import
eps or fig files into the foreground (the xfig conversion is really bad,
the eps conversion is very limitted).
In the Bitmap View this allows you to import a bitmap image into the character.
This menu item is not available in the Metrics View
In the font view you may select multiple files (by holding down the shift
or control keys when clicking on them), and all selected bitmap fonts will
be imported into the sfd.
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Merge Kern Info...
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Only available in the font view window. This command will allow you to search
for an afm, tfm or mac resource file containing kerning pairs for the specified
font. In many cases it will not be needed because when PfaEdit opens a .pfa
or .pfb font it will automagically search for an appropriate .afm file in
the same place. But sometimes afm files are stored in other directories.
And sometimes you want to import information from TeX or from mac files.
NOTE: PfaEdit is
unable to read an encoding from tfm files or from mac resource files, it
is your responsibility to ensure that the encoding of your font matches that
of the tfm file BEFORE merging kerning information. This is unfortunate,
sorry.
Note: When loading a postscript font from a mac resource file, the associated
kerning data will be found in the FOND stored with a bitmap font for this
face. PfaEdit can't guess the name of this file when loading the font. You
must figure it out yourself.
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Print...
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Not available in the bitmap view. Allows you to print out all the characters
in the font, a text sample of the font, or specific characters at a very
large scale.
See the section on printing for more information.
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Display...
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Not available in the bitmap view. Similar to print, except it displays what
you will see on the screen. You must have freetype on your system for it
to be of any use. See the section on display for
more information.
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Execute Script...
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Only in the font view. Brings up a dlg and allows you to enter a
script, which could be just calling a prewritten
script file. There is a [Call] button in the dlg to help you locate any such
files. The default extension is "*.pe" (postscript edit) but you can change
that with the [Filter] button if you use something else.
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Script Menu
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Only in the font view. You may define up to 10
scripts that you want to execute frequently
and place them in this menu. The scripts may also be invoked by short cut
with the first one being invoked by Control-Meta(Alt)-1, the second
Control-Meta-2, and the tenth by Control-Meta-0. The scripts are set in the
preferences dialog
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Preferences...
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This pops up a dialog allowing you to configure various
esoteric bits of pfaedit.
A number of things that might be controlled from a preference window are
controlled by X Resources.
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Quit
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Exits the program, prompting you whether to save any changed fonts.