James Newton, Host wrote:
> I would find a standard font (like Ariel or the GPL equivalent) and render
> all the characters to a black and white bit map at 4 times the desired
> resolution (20x28 in this case) then convert to 4-bit gray scale and reduce
> by resampleing to one quarter the original size. That gets you meaningful
> gray scale values. Actually, you can just create a 4 bit gray scale image
> and type onto that with most graphics programs.
>   

That's sort of the approach I planned to take. The "rendering" part is 
the challenge. I thought the TeX/METAFONT approach would be the most 
versatile, however I still haven't figured out how to render a font to a 
particular size. In the approach you suggest, I think you want to render 
the characters to a 1-bit depth but at twice the desired resolution, 
instead of 4 times. The total number of bits for the character is 5*7*4= 
140 = 10*14*1. At 4 times, the total number is 20*28*1 = 560.

Mark's suggestion of starting with an 8-bit deep font and keeping the 
upper nibble may work. However, I still need to figure out how to render 
to the font to the right size.

Peter's suggestion of using gv and PostScript  looks promising. I'll 
investigate this next.

Scott
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