On the creation of ChiWriter PostScript font files

The ChiWriter PostScript font files are plain text files, except that their last line consists of one ASCII symbol with code 4. They can be created from LFT font files by means of the program CW2PS.EXE belonging to the ChiWriter package and working under MS-DOS. For example, if you want to use a font file named GREEK.LFT for creating a corresponding Postscript font file with the name GREEK.PSF then you should apply CW2PS with first parameter GREEK.LFT and second parameter GREEK.PSF. Actually you may add also a third parameter of the form, say, -fG (where "G" can be replaced by some other character), but this is not needed for the GREEK font which is one of the fonts present in the standard ChiWriter distributions. Without the third parameter the result will be the same as with -fG, namely the following line will be present near to the end of the file GREEK.PSF:

  /UniqueID 71 def

(note that 71 is the ASCII code of "G"). In the concrete case, however, some fonts designed by Lyubomir Ivanov and not present in the standard distributions were also used in the ChiWriter files, for instance a font with the name MIX, and the application of CW2PS to such fonts needs a third parameter. To create a file MIX.PSF, I used the command

CW2PS MIX.LFT MIX.PSF -fE

(I choosed to put "E" in the third parameter, since MIX was the fifth font in the concrete font enumeration, and "E" is the fifth character in the Roman alphabet. However, such an interrelation is actually not obligatory.)

Remark. Each LFT font file contains near its beginning a record of the name under which it has been created (if the file has not been renamed later then this name will, of course, coincide with the current file name). The program CW2PS.EXE always copies this record into the produced PostScript font file, namely into the line before the last one, and the same record must occur in the font-switching section of the initialization file if the produced font file has to be used. For example, I applied the above command to a file MIX.LFT having its name recorded in it, a line

/MIX.LFT exch definefont pop

is present in the produced file MIX.PSF, and my file INIT.PS contains a line

/F5 { /MIX.LFT findfont 12 scalefont setfont } bind def

Warning. The PSF files created by the program CW2PS.EXE contain also a line that can be an obstacle for viewing the results of the conversion of the ChiWriter files. The line in question is the second one from the beginning and looks as follows:

serverdict begin 0 exitserver

This line must be commented or deleted!

Last modification of this file: May 19, 2006