The TeXtrace project

TeXtrace is a bundle of Unix scripts that use a freeware boundary tracing package 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 remain fonts which many people find useful and which fail to attract the paid experts.

The project was started by Péter Szabó, and its current state is available via the {project's entry on Sourceforge} and notable sets of fonts on CTAN generated using TeXtrace (apart from Péter Szabó's own EC/TC font set) are Vladimir Volovich's CM-Super set, which covers the EC, TC, and the Cyrillic LH font sets, and Takanori Uchiyama's set of the MusixTeX fonts.

Another system that says it's "inspired" by TeXtrace is mftrace: this is a small Python program that does the same job; both systems are increasingly being used to provide Type 1 fonts to the public domain.

CM-Super fonts
fonts/ps-type1/cm-super (zip, browse)
textrace
http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/
TeXtrace on SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/textrace/
Type 1 versions of EC and TC fonts
fonts/ps-type1/ec (zip, browse)
musixtex fonts
fonts/musixtex/ps-type1/musixps-unix.tar.gz

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=textrace