NAME

prebuild − Build PostScript prebuilt font file from bitmap description files

SYNOPSIS

/usr/bin/prebuild fontname fonttype fontuniqueid fontcharactersetname bdffile ... 

DESCRIPTION

prebuild is used to build a binary file format known as the prebuilt file for use by the NextStep(tm) Window Server.  It takes as input a number of standard Adobe Bitmap Description format files and produces a much more compact binary representation of the bits in those files.  The Bitmap Distribution Format files provided as input to prebuild must be given in order from smallest to largest. 

In Display PostScript, every face of every font is defined by a PostScript program (see the PostScript(R) Language Reference Manual for more details on how to create a PostScript font).  In order for the NextStep system to use a font, the font creator must provide the PostScript language file defining the outlines of the characters of the font, and an Adobe Font Metrics file describing separately the widths of those characters. 

To allow the window server to see this new font, the outline and afm files for it must be placed in the appropriate subdirectories one of the three standard Fonts directories: /NextLibrary/Fonts, /LocalLibrary/Fonts, or ~/Library/Fonts.  Below each of these three directories there are three subdirectories: outline, to contain the PostScript-language outline fonts definitions; afm, to contain the afm files; and bitmap, to contain the files output by prebuild. 

prebuild outputs a file in the current directory whose name is the name of the font followed by the suffix indicating the byte sex of the file (.bepf for big-endian files, and .lepf for little-endian files).  This file should be placed in the bitmap subdirectory of the appropriate Fonts directory.  By convention, the BDF files used as input to prebuild may be kept in a fourth subdirectory of Fonts, called bitmapSources; however, this is not required by prebuild. 

FILES

/NextLibrary/Fonts/{outline,bitmap,afm}location of NeXT-provided fonts
/LocalLibrary/Fonts/{outline,bitmap,afm}location of locally-provided fonts
~/Library/Fonts/{outline,bitmap,afm}location of user-provided fonts

SEE ALSO

screenafm(1)

BUGS

prebuild should output both a .bepf and a .lepf file.  This will be fixed. 

The fonttype and fontuniqueid are actually ignored. 

NeXT, Inc.  —  January 12, 1989