Re: Fonts for console/fb for various locales: a proposal

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> 4. Rasterizing (c). This is the whole purpose of METAFONT.
>>> METAFONT is a rasterizer.

Yes...but not _just_ a rasterizer; it's also a language for describing
the outlines to be rasterized.  Not that that's terribly relevant from
what I can see.

>> Rasterization of vector fonts by privileged code has been a major
>> source of security holes in other operating systems.

> We already have support for alpha fonts, which are rasterized vector
> fonts.  On most supported hardware you can take a truetype font, feed
> it to a utility found in xsrc/local/programs/ttf2wsfont to generate a
> rendering in whatever size you specify, and load that into a
> wsdisplay.

The rasterizing there happens in nonprivileged code, though.

> There's also something to directly load BDF fonts.

Those are already rasterized; BDF is a bitmap-font format.

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