Subject: X term and other stuff

From: Chin-Long Michael Cheng <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 90 11:06:39 -0500

This is a reply to one of J.B. Wang's message, but is of general interest
to everyone:

>   1) It is not a bad idea to obtain some font sets from these resources.
>        bitmap fonts can't be copyrighted, so don't be afraid of it. But
>        program descriptions of fonts and names of fonts can be copyrighted,

You mean it's OK for us to take a commercial bitmap font and
release it in anyway we wish?

>3. We might need to think of Fan2-Ti3-Zi4 library seriously. There is a
>        significant lack of it in the network. If some body can provide
>        a few basic font sets, we can work out the others.

On release X11R4 of X Windows, there is a multi-lingual
terminal emulator called mlxterm from Singapore. It displays
regular ASCII, Shifted JIS, and Shifted GB internal codes. Included with this
package are public domain 16x16 and 24x24 simplified character fonts
and 16x16 Fan-Ti fonts in Adobe bdf format.  It's
straightforward to convert these fonts into JB's CCLIB format.
If anyone has tools readily available, please speak up. Otherwise,
I'll volunteer a couple of days at the end of the semester for this undertaking.
(I'll also e-mail this Singapore group to ask them for the
24x24 Fan-ti font, which they claim to have, but was nowhere to be found in
the distribution.)

My initial impression with mlxterm is that it's  buggy
and user-unfriendly, but workable nevertheless. What we need now is
to take a very simple editor, convert it to accept 2-byte codes,
and we have a screen editor for Chinese on X-Windows.

Mike

---

From: Samuel Lam <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 90 15:28:06 PDT

> terminal emulator called mlxterm from Singapore.  ...
> Included with this package are ... and 16x16 Fan-Ti fonts in
> Adobe bdf format.  It's straightforward to convert these
> fonts into JB's CCLIB format.  If anyone has tools readily
> available, please speak up.

The C program bdf2hzfont.c in pub/yeung/fontUtil on june.cs.washington.edu
can convert a BDF format font file to a set of "hzfont" format font files.
This program is less than 4K long.

Going from "hzfont" format to "cclib" format is then a relatively straight
forward concatenate-and-fill operation.

> I'll also e-mail this Singapore group to ask them for the
> 24x24 Fan-ti font, ...

Please let us know if/when you find more freely-redistributable
complex-script Chinese font.

...Sam
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