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CTAN directory: /fonts/utilities/pkbbox

You can get the contents of this directory bundled as a zip file.

Packages in this directory:

Identifier Caption
pkbbox Derive glyph bounding boxes by building PK file.

Files

Name Size* Date UTC Notes
README 2 KiB 1994-Aug-25 Shown below
pkbbox.exe 26 KiB 1994-Jul-19
pkbbox.mak 1 KiB 1994-Jul-19
pkbbox.pas 4 KiB 1992-Nov-30

  *File sizes in kibibytes.

Contents of README

PKBBOX is a hack that exists only because some Type1 fonts on the
net do not include AFM files.  I was determined to use these fonts
(I don't remember why anymore ;-) so I discovered that the following
sequence would produce a legal, if imperfect, AFM file:

 1) Use PFM2AFM to generate an initial AFM file.  This file is insufficient
    for generating a TFM file because it does not contain the bounding
    boxes for the characters.

 2) Use PS2PK to produce a PK file from the Type 1 font.  This works because
    PS2PK doesn't care about the bounding boxes.

 3) Use PKBBOX to build a (more) valid AFM file.  PKBBOX reads the original
    AFM file and the PK file and constructs reasonable (but *not* perfect)
    bounding boxes.  It produces a new AFM file with this information.

 4) Use the new AFM file to generate a TFM file.

 5) That's it, use the font.

The bounding boxes are going to be wrong if the font has letters which have
large descenders or other "bumps" that extend out of the real bounding box,
but it was the best I could do.

                                                  Cheers,
                                                    norm

P.S. Feel free to drop me a note if you have any difficulties, although I
can't promise that I'll be able to help very much.

---
Norman Walsh <norm@ora.com> | Unable to locate coffee---operator halted.
Production Tools Specialist |  
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