TeX Bitmap Font Module for FreeType Rasterizer

Abstract

METAFONT is the programmable font creation tool that is able to create different font styles by changing its parameter values. It does not require to create a new font file for every distinctive style because it can automatically produce a variety of font styles. Therefore, this advantage of METAFONT can also be applied to the complex characters such as CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean). The output generated by METAFONT is TeX-based bitmap font such as Generic Font (GF) along with font metrics file. Such fonts cannot be used outside the TeX-based environments. In this paper, a module named TeX Bitmap Font Module is proposed for FreeType font engine. FreeType supports outline and bitmap fonts but it doesn't support TeX related fonts such as GF. TeX Bitmap Font Module enables the direct usage of TeX-based bitmap font such as GF. It also provides a direct support of METAFONT and GF inside FreeType on Linux environment.