''[[https://sourceforge.net/projects/textrace/|TeXtrace]]'', originally developed by Péter Szabó,
is a [[https://pts.50.hu/textrace/|bundle of Unix scripts]] that use Martin Weber's freeware
boundary tracing package ''[[http://autotrace.sourceforge.net|autotrace]]''
to generate Type 1 outline fonts from MetaFont bitmap font outputs.
The result is unlikely ever to be of the quality of the commercially-produced Type 1 font,
but there's always the [[http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/|FontForge]] font
editor to tidy things. Whatever, there remain fonts which many people find useful
and which fail to attract the paid experts, and auto-tracing is providing a useful service here.
Notable sets of fonts generated using ''TeXtrace'' are Péter Szabó's own
EC/TC font set ''tt2001'' and Vladimir Volovich's CM-Super set,
which covers the EC, TC, and the Cyrillic LH font sets (for details of both of which sets,
see [[5_fichiers:fontes:fontes_t1_8bits|"8-bit" type 1 fonts]]).
Another system, which arrived slightly later, is
''[[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/|mftrace]]'':
this is a small Python program that does the same job.
''Mftrace'' may use either ''autotrace'' (like ''TeXtrace'')
or Peter Selinger's ''[[http://potrace.sourceforge.net|potrace]]''
to produce the initial outlines to process. ''Mftrace'' is said to be
more flexible, and easier to use, than is ''TeXtrace'', but both systems
are increasingly being used to provide Type 1 fonts to the public domain.
The ''MetaType1'' system aims to use MetaFont font sources, by way
of MetaPost and a bunch of scripts and so on, to produce high-quality
Type 1 fonts. The first results, the [[https://ctan.org/pkg/lm|Latin Modern fonts]],