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Chapter 1
Overview
1.1 Introduction
Recent years have seen an uprising in the use of networking, multitasking
environments. Most of these environments make use of the Unix operating
system, which allows more than one task to be executed simultaneously. As
more powerful computers became available, this power was used to provide
better user interfaces, supportive of the user, easier to learn and use. X
Windows is a graphical user interface which uses windows, pull down or pop
up menus and a pointing device. With X Windows multiple applications
can run simultaneously in windows. X Windows provides the means for
creating device independent applications, and facilities for generating multifont text and two dimensional graphics. FontCreator uses the X Windows
environment, to enable users to create easily, their own fonts for use with
their applications or for experimenting. Throughout this dissertation, we
concentrate on showing how to use FontCreator eectively to create fonts.
1.1.1 Report Structure
The rst chapter is an introduction to the FontCreator project. The second
chapter is an overview of X Windows, with special mention on windows,
window managers and toolkits. The third chapter explains the character
properties and goes on to dene the X Logical Font Description and the
Bitmap Distribution Format which is used in X Windows. The chapter
ends with an example of a font le. The next chapter establishes the need
for the FontCreator and describes the way FontCreator was designed and
implemented, the FontCreator toolkit and how FontCreator works. We have
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