PKTYPE(1)

✨ PKTYPE(1) ✨

okay bestie, so this is pktype from the General Commands Manual section, and it's giving font detective energy 🔍💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

pktype — verify and translate a packed font bitmap file to plain text

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pktype pk_file[pk]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

ngl, this manual page is not meant to be exhaustive. The complete documentation for this version of TeX lives in the info file or the manual Web2C: A TeX implementation, so go look there if you want the whole lore 📚✨

So here's the tea: the pktype program translates a packed font file (pk) — the kind that's output by, for example, gftopk(1) — into a file that humans can actually read. Iconic behaviour, honestly 🫶

It also pulls double duty as a pk file-validating program — like, if pktype can read it, it's correct, periodt — and as an example of a pk-reading program for other software that wants to read pk files. Main character energy for real 👑

The input pk_file on the command line may omit the suffix pk. And the plain text translation is always written to standard output — no cap, no surprise files appearing in your directory 💀

The output file gives a compact encoding of the packed encoding, using conventions described in the source code (iykyk). Here's the vibe:

• run lengths of black pixels alternate with parenthesized run lengths of white pixels
• brackets are used to indicate when a row should be repeated

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

pktype looks for pk_file in the usual places according to Kpathsea.

See tex(1) for the details of the searching 🔎✨

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• dvitype(1)
• gftopk(1)
• gftype(1)
• Donald E. Knuth et al., Metafontware.

💜 AUTHORS 💜

• Tomas Rokicki wrote the program
• Donald E. Knuth originally ported it to Unix
• Pierre MacKay originally adapted it for compilation with Web2c

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okay that's the whole thing bestie, slay 💅✨ this was Web2C 2025, dated 16 June 2015 — mwah, obsessed, bye 🎀🦋💖