Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format

Comments Can be used to store arrays of ornamental glyph and other bitmap data. All records, keywords, and information fields contain only ASCII characters and are separated by spaces. Lines are terminated by a , , or pair. More than one record may appear on a physical line. All BDF files begin with the STARTFONT record. This record contains a single information field indicating the version of the BDF format used in the file. The STARTFONT record contains all of the information within the BDF file and is terminated by the ENDFONT keyword as the last record in the file. COMMENT records may be found anywhere between the STARTFONT and ENDFONT records. They usually contain human-readable text that is ignored by font-reader applications. The FONT record specifies the name of the font contained within the BDF file. The name is specified using either the XFD font name or a private font name. The name may contain spaces, and the line containing the FONT record must be terminated by an end-of-line character. SIZE specifies the size of the font in points and the resolution of the output device that is to support the font. The FONTBOUNDINGBOX record stores the size and the position of the font's bounding box as an offset from the origin (the lower-left corner of the bitmap). The CHARS record indicates the number of font character (glyph) segments stored in the file. The STARTCHAR record contains subrecords that store each glyph's information and data. The STARTCHAR keyword is followed by the name of the glyph. This name can be up to 14 characters in length and may not contain any spaces. The subrecords specify the index number of the glyph, the scalable width, and the position of the character. The BITMAP record contains the actual glyph data encoded as 4-digit hexadecimal values. All bitmapped lines are padded on the right with zeros out to the nearest byte boundary. All of the glyph information is contained between the STARTCHAR record and the terminating ENDCHAR record. There is one STARTCHAR/ENDCHAR section per glyph stored in the BDF file. Refer to the BDF documentation included with the X11R6 distribution for more information about the BDF information records. For further information, see the BDF specification on the CD-ROM. You may also find information about the BDF format in the X11R5 distribution of the X Window System, available via FTP from: This page is taken from the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats and is licensed by O'Reilly under the Creative Common/Attribution license.