Readme & Contents: BitFontEdit 3.1.3 (for text terminals)   
Mar. 1997 (removed html tags June 1998) 

For links to other files go a few screens forward.  

This software helps you draw (create) your own bit-mapped font for
VT220+ and Wyse terminals (and in the future: printers).  You draw the
characters as *'s in a text file using any editor or word processor.
Then this program scans your drawings and converts them to soft-font
code to download to terminals.  You will likely need to do a small
amount of "programming" in a printer/terminal language to load your
soft-font.  Another program converts soft-font to a drawing with *'s.  

I wrote this program in C around 1990 to generate bit-mapped soft-fonts
which can be downloaded into video display terminals: Wyse, VT220.
Note that it is mostly based on 1990 (or earlier) manuals and may not
be fully up to date.  Improvements in the user interface, error
checking, documentation, and code modularity have been made since
1990.   

Here is an example of a row of Russian letters you might "draw" in a pattern
file.  The first letter is A and 6th one is E:
|       ||       ||       ||       ||       ||       ||       ||       |
|   *   ||****** ||****** ||*******||  *****||*******||*  *  *|| ***** |
|  * *  ||*      ||*     *||*     *|| *    *||*      ||*  *  *||*     *|
| *   * ||*      ||*     *||*      || *    *||*      || * * * ||      *|
|*     *||*      ||*     *||*      || *    *||*      || * * * ||      *|
|*     *||****** ||****** ||*      || *    *||*******|| ***** ||  **** |
|*******||*     *||*     *||*      ||*     *||*      || * * * ||      *|
|*     *||*     *||*     *||*      ||*     *||*      || * * * ||      *|
|*     *||*     *||*     *||*      ||*     *||*      ||*  *  *||*     *|
|*     *||*******||****** ||*      ||*******||*******||*  *  *|| ***** |
|       ||       ||       ||       ||*     *||       ||       ||       |
Next you run the pat2sf program on your patterns and obtain the
soft-font code.  After this soft-font is downloaded to a terminal,
typing on the keyboard will display this font on the screen.  You will
probably need to write a script of some type (a shell script, Perl
script, etc.)  to set up your terminal correctly, load the font into
the appropriate bank, etc.  

sf2pat does the inverse of the above.  It converts soft-font to a
pattern file containing * characters.   

To use this software you will need an C compiler that will work for
ANSI C (such as the one from the Free Software Foundation).  Be sure
to look over the documentation before compiling/using.  These programs
have not been tested much. Be sure to set tabs at 8 when reading the
text files (most web browsers do this automatically).   

Here is a list of the files available for BitFontEdit.  If you
downloaded the tar archive, the .html files may be .txt files instead.
The content should be essentially identical.

Documentation:
copyright.txt		Copyright and Disclaimer
term_font_intro.html	Introduction to fonts for terminals.
BitFontEditMan.html 	Manual for using BitFontEdit:   38k
history.html 		History of BitFontEdit:   8k
font_langs.html		Terminal Font Languages (rules for encoding that 
			the writer of this program needed to know about): 17k
install_softfont.txt	Terminal notes (mostly downloading methods & 
			problems): 8k
other_font_tools.txt	Other font tools (very incomplete).  Software and
			documentation by others:  3k
C_code_notes.html	Overview of the C source code of pat2sf: 16k 
13rus_pat.txt		Example pattern files: (Russian alphabet): 8k
12rus_pat.txt.  	ditto 
README.txt 		This file: 
index.html		This file+ in html format

Source code: scan.c, encode.c, pat2sf.h, sf2pat.c, makefile 
Object code (for i386) pat2sf.i386, sf2pat.i386

BitFontEdit-3.1.2.tar.gz	Archive of all the above files: 81k

To unpack it on a: 
Linux system  (with GNU's tar) type: tar -xzf BitFontEdit-....tar.gz 
Unix-like system use gunzip and then type: tar -xf BitFontEdit-....tar  

If when you download it, your screen fills with garbage, the
browser has goofed and thought it was a text file.  In any case, you
need to save the downloaded stuff to a file (or to a
folder/directory).  In some cases you must click on "save .." in the
browser's File menu.  When the tar (or .tar.gz ) archive is unpacked,
it should create the folder/directory: BitFontEdit and put everything
in it.  If you do this in MS DOS, file names will be truncated (but
still usable).  </body></html>
