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by viler 2165 days ago
At the right sizes the included 'Mx' fonts should avoid those artifacts - they're ttf but contain embedded bitmaps, which seem to be better supported in Linux than in Windows (supported, but silly hacks required) or macOS (seemingly not supported at all). :)

I do want to include .bdf fonts in future versions, especially if the conversion is as simple as that. But if I do it I want to be sure I do it correctly, and I'm still not 100% familiar with the format.
1 comments
duskwuff 2164 days ago
Any chance you can publish some details on what your workflow looks like to generate these fonts?

I'd be interested in generating some bitmap conversions of some classic non-VGA fonts, like Apple's bitmap fonts (some of which were never converted to TrueType!) and some X11 standards like fixed13.

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viler 2164 days ago
To sum it up (links to the various tools can be found at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#tools_used): usually the starting point is some sort of raw bitmap data, which I convert to .png with something like Binxelview, although ImageMagick can also do the trick. The .png then goes into Bits'N'Picas to trace the glyphs and produces an outlined .ttf.

This .ttf is far from final however, as it still needs an encoding with proper Unicode mapping, some height/metric adjustments, and so on. The specific changes depend on the font, but they can be done in Fontforge, which is very scriptable thankfully. The same goes for things like aspect correction (mark all glyphs, scale down on the X-axis) and producing embedded bitmaps (add "bitmap strikes" at the target pixel/point sizes, export w/"bitmap in TTF/OTF" option).

Fontforge's bitmap export options should also let you create bitmap-only fonts in formats like .bdf or .otb. As I still use only .fon for bitmap fonts (though this should change in the future), I do those in a different program named Fony, which like Bits'N'Picas can import the glyphs from a .png and export to .fon after some adjustments and metadata massaging.

More details than that would probably belong in a blog post or so, but that's it in a nutshell.

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