External fonts are described by a plain text file that can be read using Font.open; Font.build reads the same format from a string rather than a file. (see draw-font(2)).
The format is a header followed by any number of subfont range specifications. The header contains two numbers: the height and the ascent, both in pixels. The height is the inter-line spacing and the ascent is the distance from the top of the line to the baseline. These numbers should be chosen to display consistently all the subfonts of the font. A subfont range specification contains two or three numbers and a file name. The numbers are the inclusive range of characters covered by the subfont, with an optional starting position within the subfont, and the file name names an external file holding the subfont data. The minimum number of a covered range is mapped to the specified starting position (default zero) of the corresponding subfont. If the subfont file name does not begin with a slash, it is taken relative to the directory containing the font file. Each field must be followed by some white space. Each numeric field may be C-format decimal, octal, or hexadecimal.
External subfonts are represented in a more rigid format: an image containing character images, followed by a subfont header, followed by character information. The image has the format for external image files described in image(6). The subfont header has 3 decimal strings: n, height, and ascent. Each number is right-justified and blank padded in 11 characters, followed by a blank. The character info consists of n+1 6-byte entries, each giving values called x (2 bytes, low order byte first), top, bottom, left, and width for the successive characters from left to right (in increasing Unicode order) in the subfont. The rectangle holding the character is (x, top, xn, bottom), where xn is the x field of the next character. When the character is to be drawn in an image at point p, the rectangle is placed at (p.x+left , p.y) and the next character to be drawn is placed at (p.x+width , p.y) The x field of the last entry is used to calculate the image width of the previous character; the other fields in the last entry are irrelevant.
Note that the convention of using the character with value zero (NUL) to represent characters of zero width (see the description of Image.text in draw-image(2)) means that fonts should have, as their zeroth character, one with non-zero width.
| FONT(6 ) | Rev: Tue Mar 31 02:42:38 GMT 2015 |