About this project¶

Important things to know about bdflib and its development.

Requirements¶

Python 2.7, Python 3.5 or greater (earlier version may work, but they are unsupported)

bdflib does not require anything outside the standard library.

bdflib is published under the GNU General Public License version 3.

The source-code and issue tracker for bdflib are at https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/bdflib

Once you’ve checked out the bdflib source code, you can run the bdflib unit tests with:

$ python3 -m unittest

Alternatively, if you have tox installed, you can just run:

$ tox

to run all the tests and build all the documentation.

Bitmap Distribution Format version 2.1 (PDF format) is the X11 version of the BDF specification, based on the Adobe standard.
Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF) Specification version 2.2 (PDF format) is the Adobe version of the BDF specification. Version 2.2 is backward-compatible with version 2.1, and adds extra features to support scripts with vertical text layout. bdflib does not implement this version, but some things are better explained here than in the X11 version.
X Logical Font Description Conventions describes the extra font properties that X11 uses, above and beyond the basic BDF specification.
BDF Fonts and Modern Linux describes practical concerns with making a BDF font that will be properly recognised by a modern Linux system.