I have a collection of True Type fonts I need to convert to various sizes of HP Soft Fonts in support of an ancient application. The target sizes are fractional, so I need the conversion technique to support at least 10ths of a point in the size selection.
The following are not solutions, so far…
I found via search the program ttftosfp.exe which does just what I need, but I can’t raise the author by email to get the non-demo version.
HP claims there is a “free” program to do the conversion “somewhere on the Internet, not available from HP”. My search didn’t find that.
I’m aware of FontLab’s FONmaker, which is limited to integral point sizes.
I’m aware of PrintSoft’s TransFont, they are also non-responsive, and there’sno demo to help figure it out.
I’ve even investigated the use of the Windows printer driver to generate printer commands containing the effective character sets, and that could perhaps work, but the caching of the characters via a temporary fontmeans that the mapping of characters to their real character codes is lost, and would have to be rebuilt, or else a single character at a time sent through the printer driver, either of which is somewhat painstaking.
Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 doesn’t generate fractional bitmap sizes, and bases them on 96dpi screen fonts rather than 300dpi printer fonts anyway. Fontographer also does some strange things to .ttf fonts if you modify one, it doesn’t always produce the same encoding when you save it as the original font, even if you check the box to save the original encoding on import!
