2. What is Local Character?

Many CD-ROM books define their local characters. For example, some English Japanese dictionaries define pronunciation marks as the local characters because the character set used in CD-ROM books doesn't have pronunciation marks.

CD-ROM books also have bitmap data of the local characters. The ebfont command reads the bitmap data, convert them to a specified image formats, and write them to files. ebfont can generates image files as XBM (X BitMap format), XPM (X PixMap format), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and/or BMP. By default, XBM format is selected.

Local characters are classified to two types; narrow and wide. In narrow type characters, the height of the bitmap data is about half of its width. In wide type characters, the width and height of the bitmap data are almost same. A CD-ROM book can defines local characters of both types.

The internal fomrat specification of CD-ROM book defines four heights for local characters, for both narrow and wide types. Their witdths, heights and sizes are follows:

height	narrow	wide
16	8x16	16x16
24	16x24	24x24
30	16x30	32x30
48	24x48	48x48

By deafult, ebfont generates image files for fonts with the height of 16 pixels.