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The Format of PXL files, by David Fuchs.

A PXL file is a raster description of a single font at a particular
resolution.  These files are used by driver programs for dot matrix
devices; TEX itself knows nothing about PXL files.  Let's say a user
creates a file called FOO.MF, which is the Metafont language
description of a new font, called FOO.  In order for everyone to be
able to run TEX jobs that use this font and get their output on our
200-dot-per-inch proof device, we must first run the Metafont program
on FOO.MF, and ask it to make both a TFM file and a PXL file for it.
These files (called FOO.TFM and FOO.PXL) are then put in a public
directory so that anyone using TEX may access them.  Now, whenever a
TEX job is run that refers to FOO (\font A=FOO), the TEX program reads
in FOO.TFM to get all the width, height, depth, kerning, ligature,
and other information it needs about any font.  To get output on the
proof device, the DVI file produced by TEX must now be
processed by a device-driver program.  This program reads the
postamble of the DVI file to find out the names of all the fonts
referred to in the job, and for each font, it opens the corresponding
PXL file.  In our example, the driver would find the file FOO.PXL,
which it would then use along with the main body of the DVI file to
produce the actual output.  The DVI file tells where to put all the
characters on each page, while the PXL file(s) tell which pixels to
turn 'on' in order to make each character.

In fact, there is a little lie contained in the preceeding paragraph.
The actual name of the PXL file would be something like FOO8.1000PXL.
This means that the PXL file represents the font FOO in an 8 point
face for a 200-dot-per-inch device with a magnification of 1. (If you
don't fully understand the term 'magnification' as it is used in the
TEX world, the rest of this paragraph might not make a lot of sense.
The end of this document contains more information on magnified
fonts.)  If we also had a 100-dot-per-inch device, we would also want
to have the file FOO8.0500PXL (which we can get by asking Metafont
nicely).  This PXL file could also be used by the higher resolution
device's driver for any TEX job that asked for \font B=FOO8 at 4pt; or
one that used \font C=FOO8, but then got TEXed with magnification 500;
or one that used \font C=FOO8, but then got spooled with magnification
500.  Note that we are assuming that the font FOO is like the CM
family in that it does not scale proportionately in different point
sizes--we are only talking about the 8-point face.  If it turns out
that 8 point FOO magnified by 1.5 is exactly the same as 12-point FOO,
then we can also use FOO12.1000PXL in place of FOO8.1500PXL, and so
forth.  For fonts that scale proportionately like this, a point-size
should not be included as part of the font name, and FOO.1000PXL is by
convention the 10-point size of FOO for a 200-dot-per-inch machine.

Now for an explanation of where the bits go.  A PXL file is considered
to be a series of 32-bit words (on 36-bit machines, the four low-order
bits of each word are always zero).  In the discussion below, "left
half word" means the highest order 16 bits in a word, and "right half
word" means the 16 next-highest order bits in the word (which are
exactly the lowest order 16 bits on 32 bit machines).

Both the first and last word of a PXL file contains the PXL ID,
which is currently equal to 1001 (decimal).  The second-to-last word
is a pointer to the first word of the Font Directory. (All pointers
are relative to the first word in the file, which is word zero).

The general layout of a PXL file looks like this:
        PXL ID                  [1 word long - First word of the PXL file]
        RASTER INFO             [many words long - begins at second word]
        FONT DIRECTORY          [512 words - 517th through 6th to last word]
        CHECKSUM                [1 word - fifth to last word]
        MAGNIFICATION           [1 word - fourth to last word]
        DESIGNSIZE              [1 word - third to last word]
        DIRECTORY POINTER       [1 word - second to last word]
        PXL ID                  [1 word - Last word of the PXL file]

The Font Directory is 512 words long, and contains the Directory
Information for all the 128 possible characters.  The first four words
the Font Directory have Directoy Information about the character with
ascii value of zero, the next four words are for the character with
ascii value of one, etc.  Any character not present in the font will
have all four of its Directory Information words set to zero, so the
Directory Information for the character with ascii value X will always
be in words 4*X through 4*X+3 of the Font Directory.  For example, if
the second to last word in a PXL file contained the value 12000, then
words 12324 through 12327 of the PXL file contain information about
the ascii character "Q", since ascii "Q" = '121 octal = 81 decimal,
and 4*81=324.  The meanings of a character's four Directory words are
described below.

The first word of a character's Directory Information has the
character's Pixel Width in the left half-word, and its Pixel Height in
the right half-word.  These numbers have no connection with the
'height' and 'width' that TEX thinks the character has (from the TFM
file); rather, they are the size of the smallest bounding-box that
fits around the black pixels that form the character's raster
representation, i.e. the number of pixels wide and high that the
character is.  For example, here is a letter "Q" from some PXL file:

00 ....*******....
01 ...*********...
02 ..****...****..
03 .***.......***.
04 ****.......****
05 ***.........***
06 ***.........***
07 ***..*****..***
08 **********.****
09 .*****..******.
10 ..****...****..
11 ...*********...
12 ..X.*******..**
13 ........***.***
14 .........******
15 ..........*****
   000000000011111
   012345678901234

(The rows and columns are numbered, and the reference point of the character
is marked with an 'X', but only the stars and dots are actually part of the
character--stars represent black pixels, and dots represent white pixels.)

Note that the Pixel Width is just large enough to encompass the
leftmost and rightmost black pixels in the character.  Likewise, the
Pixel Height is just large enough to encompass the topmost and
bottommost black pixels.  So, this Q's Pixel Width is 15 and its Pixel
Height is 16, so word 12324 in the example PXL file contains 15*2^16+16.

The second word of a character's Directory Information contains the
offset of the character's reference point from its upper-left-hand
corner of the bounding box; the X-Offset in the left half-word,
Y-Offset in the right half-word.  These numbers may be negative, and
two's complement representation is used.  Remember that the positive x
direction means 'rightward' and positive y is 'downward' on the page.
The offsets are in units of pixels.  In our "Q" example, the X-Offset
is 2 and the Y-Offset is 12, so word 12325 of the example PXL file
contains 2*2^16+12.

The third word of a character's Directory Information contains the
number of the word in this PXL file where the Raster Description for
this character begins.  This number is relative to the beginning of
the PXL file, the first word of which is numbered zero.  The layout of
Raster Descriptions is explained below.  The Raster Descriptions of
consecutive characters need not be in order within a PXL file--for
instance the Raster Description for character "Q" might be followed by
the Raster Description of the character "A".  Of coures, a single
character's Raster Description is always contained in consecutive
words.

If a character is 'totally white' then the third word contains a
zero.  (The Pixel Width, Pixel Height, X-Offset and Y-Offset of
a'totally white' character must be zero too, although the TFM Width
may be non-zero.  A non-zero TFM Width would mean that the character is
a fixed width space.  TEX's standard CM fonts do not contain any such
characters.)  For the "Q" example, word 12326 might contain any number
from 0 thru 12000-16 (since Q's Raster Description is 16 words long),
let's say it is 600.

The fourth word contains the TFM Width of the character.  That is the
width that TEX thinks the character is (exactly as in the TFM file).
The width is expressed in FIXes, which are 1/(2^20)th of the design size.
The TFM Width does not take into account the magnification
at which the PXL file was prepared.  Thus, if "Q" had a width of 7
points in a 12 point font, word 327 in the PXL file would contain
trunc((7/12)*2^20).  See the TFM documentation for more information on
FIXes.

After the 512 words of Directory Information come 3 words of font
information:

First, the checksum, which should match the checksum in any DVI
file that refers to this font (otherwise TEX prepared the DVI file
under the wrong assumptions--it got the checksum from a TFM file that
doesn't match this PXL file). However, if this word is zero, no
validity check will be made.  In general, this number will appear to
contain 32 bits of nonsense.

Next is an integer representing 1000 times the magnification
factor at which this font was produced.  If the magnification factor
is XXXX, the extension to the name of this PXL file should be XXXXPXL.

Next comes the design size (just as in the TFM file, in units
of FIXes (2^(-20) unmagnified points; remember that there are 72.27
points in an inch).  The design size should also be indicated by the
last characters of the PXL's file name.  The design size is not
affected by the magnification.  For instance, if the example font is
CMR5 at 1.5 times regular size, then the PXL file
would be called CMR5.1500PXL, word 12513 would contain 1500, and word
12514 would contain 5*2^20.

The word after the design size should be the pointer to the Directory
Information, and the word after that should be the final PXL ID word.
Thus, if the number of words in the PXL file is 'p' (i.e. word numbers
zero through p-1) then Directory Information Pointer should equal
p-512-5.

All of the PXL file from word 1 up to the Font Directory contains
Raster-Descriptions.  The Raster Description of a character is
contained in consecutive words.  Bits containing a '1' correspond to
'black' pixels.  The leftmost pixel of the top row of a character's
pixel representation corresponds to the most significant bit in the
first word of its Raster Description.  The next most significant bit
in the first word corrosponds to the next to leftmost pixel in its top
row, and so on.  If the character's Pixel Width is greater than 32,
the 33rd bit in the top row corrosponds to the most significant bit in
the second word of its Raster Description.  Each new raster row begins
in a new word, so the final word for each row probably will not be
"full" (unless the Pixel Width of the character is evenly divisible by
32).  The most significant bits are the ones that are valid, and the
unused low order bits will be zero.  From this information, it can be
seen that a character with Pixel Width W and Pixel Height H
requires exactly (ceiling(W/32))*H words for its Raster Description.

In our "Q" example, words 600 through 615 would have the binary
values shown here (high order bit on the left):

600 00001111111000000000000000000000
601 00011111111100000000000000000000
602 00111100011110000000000000000000
603 01110000000111000000000000000000
604 11110000000111100000000000000000
605 11100000000011100000000000000000
606 11100000000011100000000000000000
607 11100111110011100000000000000000
608 11111111110111100000000000000000
609 01111100111111000000000000000000
610 00111100011110000000000000000000
611 00011111111100000000000000000000
612 00001111111001110000000000000000
613 00000000111011100000000000000000
614 00000000011111100000000000000000
615 00000000001111100000000000000000

As an example of the case where the Pixel Width is greater than 32,
consider a character with Pixel Width = 40 and Pixel Height = 30.  The
first word of its Raster Description contains the the leftmost 32
pixels of the top row in the character.  The next word of the Raster
Description contains the remaining 8 pixels of the first row of the
character in its most significant 8 bits, with all remaining bits
zero.  The third word contains the left 32 pixels of the second row of
the character, etc.  So, each row takes 2 words, and there are 30
rows, so the Raster Description of this character requires 60 words.

Finally, some implementation notes and advice for DVI-to-device program
writers:  First, please note that PXL files supercede our older raster
description (VNT) files.  One notable difference is that VNT files claimed
to have two representations for each character, one being the 90 degree
rotation of the other.  While a rotated copy of every character is useful
in many circumstances, there is no reason that installations using only one
character orientation should be burdened with so much wasted space.  Metafont
outputs PXL files as described above, and there is a seperate utility that
can read a PXL file and write a rotated version into a new PXL file.
Naming conventions to keep various rotations of the same font straight are
currently under consideration.

Another item still under consideration is alternate packing scheems.
You may have noticed that the current way that rasters are stored is
fairly wastfull of space: Why should a new raster row begin in the
next word rather than the next byte of the raster description?  The
answer is that this is for the sake of the poor people who are doing
page-painting for their Versatec/Varian on their 32-bit mainframe
computer.  All the extra zeros help them write a faster paint program.
An alternate, as yet unimplemented, PXL format would pack the rasters
tighter for the sake of those who have a minicomputer dedicated to
doing the painting process.  Such byte-packed PXL files will be
identified by a PXL ID of 1002.  A straightforward utility program can
convert between word-packed and byte-packed PXL files.

For those of you still in a fog about character widths, here's more prose:
The intent is that a DVI-to-device program should look like DVITYP,
always keeping track of the current-position-on-the-page in
RSU-coordinates.  DVITYP looks at TFM files in order to get the
character width info necessary to interpret a DVI file in this way.
The DVI-to-device program shouldn't have to open a lot of TFM files in
addition to the PXL files it will be needing, so the system has
redundant width information for each character--a PXL file has all of
the character widths exactly as they appear in the TFM file (in units
of FIXes).  Thus, the DVI-to-device program can completely interpret a
DVI file by getting character widths from PXL files rather than TFM
files.  The purpose of the CHECKSUM is to ensure that the TFM files used
by TEX when writing the DVI file are compatible with the PXL files the
DVI-to-device program sees (so if someone changes a font and makes new
TFMs but not new PXL files, you'll have some way of knowing other than
seeing ragged right margins).

In the places where DVITYP would print a message indicating that
"Character C in Font F should be placed at location <H,V> on the page"
(where H and V are in RSUs), the DVI-to-device program should cause
character C to be put on the paper at the point closest to <H,V> that
the resolution of the device allows.  The important point is that the
DVI-to-device program should NOT attempt to keep track of the
current-position-on-the-page in device-units, since this will lead to
big roundoff problems that will show up as ragged right margins.

Note again that the character widths are different things than
pixel-widths: The width of the character "A" in CMR10 is (say) 6.7123
points, independant of the representation of that character on the
page.  For a 100-dot-per-inch device, the raster representation of "A"
might be 18 pixels wide, while for a 200-dot-per-inch device, the best
representation might be 33 pixels wide.

Here is some more information to help clear up misunderstandings
concerning magnification.  (Much of this is taken from TEX's errata
list, and is destined to be included in the next TEX manual.)  One
point to keep in mind is that the character widths in a PXL file are
exactly as in the TFM file. Since the magnification factor is not
taken into account, a DVI-to-device program should multiply the widths
by the product (font design size) x (overall job magnification) x
(font magnification) x (254000 RSU/inch) x (1/2^20 point/FIX) x
(1/72.27 inch/point) to get the effective character width in RSUs. (Of
course, this multiplication should only be done once per character per
job!)

It is sometimes valuable to be able to control the magnification factor at
which documents are printed.  For example, when preparing document masters
that will be scaled down by some factor at a later step in the printing
process, it is helpful to be able to specify that they be printed blown up by
the reciprocal factor.  There are several new features in TEX to allow for
greater ease in the production of such magnified intermediate output.

TEX should be thought of as producing as output a "design document": a
specification of what the final result of the printing process should
look like.  In the best of worlds, this "design document" would be
constructed as a print file in a general and device independent
format.  Printing a magnified copy of this document for later
reduction should be viewed as the task of the printer and its
controlling software, and not something that TEX should worry about.
But real world constraints may force us to deviate from this model
somewhat.

First, consider the plight of a TEX user who plans to print a document
magnified by a factor of two on a printer that only handles 8.5" by 11"
paper.  In order to determine an appropriate \hsize and \vsize, this user
will have to divide the paper dimensions by the planned magnification factor.
Since computers are so good at dividing, TEX offers this user the option of
setting the "magnification" parameter to 2000, warning TEX of the anticipated
factor of 2 blow up, and then specifying \hsize and \vsize in units of
"truein" instead of "in".  When inputting a "true" distance, TEX divides by
the scale factor that "magnification" implies, so as to cancel the effect of
the anticipated scaling.  Normal units refer to distances in the "design
document", while "true" units refer to distances in the magnified printer
output.

Secondly, some existing print file format and printer combinations
have no current provision for magnified printing.  This is not
generally the case for DVI files, but a Press file, for example, uses
absolute distances internally in all positioning commands, and Press
printers treat these distances as concrete instructions without any
provision for scaling.  There is a program that takes a Press file and
a scale factor as input and produces as output a new Press file in
which all distances have been appropriately scaled.  But it is
inconvenient to be forced to use this scaling program on a regular
basis.  Instead, the Press output module of TEX chooses to scale up
all distances by the "magnification" factor when writing the output
Press file.  Thus, the Press files that TEX writes are not
representations of TEX's abstract "design document", but rather
representations of the result of magnifying it by the factor
(\parval12)/1000.  On the other hand, the DVI files written by other
versions of TEX containing normal units of distances, and the software
that translates DVI files to instructions that drive various output
devices will do the magnification by themselves, perhaps even using a
magnification that was not specified in the TEX source program; if the
user has not specified "true" dimensions, his or her DVI output file
will represent the design document regardless of magnification.

Caveat:  Due to the manner in which the current implementation of TEX writes
Press files, it is not permissible to change the value of parameter 12 in the
middle of a TEX run.  If you want to produce magnified output, you should
reset parameter 12 once very early in your document by using the  \chpar12
control sequence, and from then on leave it alone.  Another caveat below
discusses the situation in more detail.

The magnification mechanism has been extended to include font specifications
as well:  in order to print a document that is photographically magnified, it
is essential to use magnified fonts.  A font is specified by the "\font"
control sequence, which now has the syntax
        "\font <fontcode>=<filename> at <dimen>".
The "at" clause is optional.  If present, the dimension specified is taken
as the desired size of the font, with the assumption that the font should be
photographically expanded or shrunk as necessary to scale it to that size
times the magnification factor specified by parameter 12. For example,
the two fonts requested by the control sequences
        "\font a=CMR10 at 5pt" and "\font b=CMR5 at 5pt"
will look somewhat different.  Font a will be CMR10 photographically reduced
by a factor of two, while font b will be CMR5 at its normal size (so it should
be easier to read, assuming that it has been designed well).

The dimension in a font specification can use any units, either standard or
"true".  The interpretation of "true" here is identical to its interpretation
in the specification of any other distance:  asking for a font "at 5pt"
requests that the font be 5 points in size in TEX's "design document", while
asking for a font "at 5truept" requests that the font be 5 points in size
after the scaling implied by the "magnification" factor.

If the "at <dimen>" clause is omitted, TEX defaults the requested size to the
design size of the font, interpreted as a design (non-"true") distance.
Thus, the control sequence "\font a=CMR10" is equivalent to the sequence
"\font a=CMR10 at 10pt", assuming that the designer of cmr10 has indeed
told TEX that cmr10 is a 10-point font.

Caveat: This extension allows the TEX user to request any
magnification of any font.  In general, only certain standard
magnifications of fonts will be available at most raster printers,
while most high-resolution devices have scalable fonts.  The user of
TEX at any particular site must be careful to request only those fonts
that the printer can handle.

Caveat: As mentioned above, you shouldn't change the value of
parameter 12 in the middle of a run.  TEX uses the value of parameter
12 in the following three ways: (i) Whenever the scanner sees a "true"
distance, it divides by the current magnification.  (ii) At the end of
every page, TEX's output module may scale all distances by the current
magnification while converting this page to format for an output
device (this doesn't happen with DVI output).  (iii) At the very end
of the TEX run, the output module uses the current magnification to
scale the requested sizes of all fonts.  Given this state of affairs,
it is best not to change parameter 12 once any "true" distance has
been scanned and once any page has been output.

Some device-drivers give the user the option of overriding the
magnification at which the TEX job was run.  Note that running a given
TEX job with \magnify{2000} is not the same as running it with
\magnify{1000} and then asking the driver to override the
magnification to 2000.  The difference will be in the dimensions of
the pages; in the first case, the output will be, say, 8.5" by 11"
pages filled with double size fonts, while in the second case the
output will be 17" by 22" pages will double size fonts.

This is a new document, so it is bound to contain outright errors along
with the portions that are merely misleading.  I would certainly be glad
to hear of any errors, but I am also interested in which parts of the
explanation need clearing up, either by adding to or changing the text.

                        --drf
DataMuseum.dk

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