The X.org Standards include Bitmap Distribution Format spec version 2.1. Adobe has since (in 1993) published an updated version of the spec as version 2.2, which can be found at http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5005.BDF_Spec.pdf
I was looking for some antialiased "bitmap" (pixmap actually) font format that is supported by X. FontForge can generate BDF files from TrueType fonts, so I thought it would be that simple. However if I use a depth of 4 bits per pixel, it exports them as BDF version 2.3! I'm not sure if that spec exists yet in any official form. But this page http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/BDFgrey.html describes Microsoft extensions for greymap fonts, which I'm guessing the FontForge author probably considers to be a defacto 2.3 version of the spec. And here http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/index.html#features we see the statement "By default, FreeType 2 supports the following font formats. * TrueType fonts (and collections) ... * BDF fonts (including anti-aliased ones) ..." So maybe antialiased fonts could be supported in this way. Otherwise what about PCF? Can it handle pixmap glyphs? I'm thinking probably not. (Yes I'm aware that for most purposes, especially for antialiasing, people are using TrueType nowadays. But I do wonder if some pre-rasterized format would not be more efficient for use on embedded systems.)
Adding missing QA contact
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