New Alphabet

[devoinregress]

I have ideas for a two new fonts, cross stich pattern and more importantly Wim Crowel's New Alphabet.

The problem is, How do I make rockbox .fnt files? Can I do that through FontLab? What program do I use and how do I do that. I think the new alphabet will be perfect for rockbox due to resolution and size limitations.

[Llorean]

All you need is a tool that can export a BDF font. We provide a tool to convert from BDF to Rockbox FNT.

[devoinregress]

So it looks like I should make it in FontForge.

[terrence1019]

This looks like a promising font. One of the issues faced with making themes is having an ideal font to complement them. It thing that we should do like devoinregress and karashata (creator of acknowledge-12) and begin working on new fonts.

[karashata]

If I could find a Windows-based BDF font editor I'd clean up some of the fonts I made since there are a few that didn't turn out quite as nice as I'd have liked.  That being said, I did make a variety of fonts that are readable in Rockbox, though most are only 10 and 12 pixels high (line height) since my DAP has a rather small screen.  I have the fonts in a zip file on my computer and I can dump the zip onto a file hosting site if anyone wants them, and the TTF files I converted them from are freely available if anyone wants to make larger versions of any of those fonts.  One note, though:  If anyone does make larger fonts, it will take some trial and error to find out what point sizes make what line height.

[crzyboyster]

karashata: I would like to see/use your fonts...

[karashata]

crzyboyster:  I've uploaded the fonts here:

http://www.megashares.com/upostproc.php?fid=556042

Enjoy!

[crzyboyster]

I loaded those onto my ipod nano and I was blown away! Those fonts look amazing! I'll see about using them in my themes, but when I do, I'll be sure to give you credit.

How exactly did you make them, though? I have tried making fonts but they never come out good using the font converter tool on the wiki. And can you make some good sans-serif fonts? I'm getting bored of helvR10  

[karashata]

I used the font conversion tools on the wiki as a matter of fact, but it was a lot of trial and error to find fonts that actually converted well at the sizes I wanted/needed.

Unfortunately, most of the fonts that I tried didn't convert well, either because the letters all ended up squashed together or because parts of the letters vanished due to being too thin and converting to empty space.  I found that the best fonts to convert were thicker fonts with large spacing between letters, as they tended to hold up best to the conversion.  As you may have noticed with some of those fonts, they're quite wide and wouldn't work as well on smaller screen DAPs.

EDIT:  I'm not overly interested in trying to convert any more fonts, because the process takes a long time, and most of the fonts out there wouldn't convert properly with the tools available.

[devoinregress]

I wish there was an editor that I could design on a pixel grid instead of vector. Any suggestions? I am running OS X, Linux, and Windows so I can run just about anything.

FontForge just doesn't handle bitmap well and fontlab doesn't do bitmap at all.
I am guessing it isn't possible yet to have different shades to anti-alias type? Maybe someone can work on a font format made up of GIF or PNG files so that we can easily create beautiful anti-aliased fonts easily.

[MaW]

I suspect that would require a major change to the font renderer to allow it to do alpha compositing, not to mention adding a decoder for the chosen image format to the Rockbox core. Big changes (although a PNG decoder would be nice for album art too).

Although having little familiarity with the Rockbox code I have no idea how hard it would be to add an alpha-channel-capable blitter. Or, actually, how good pre-antialised fonts with an alpha channel would look. iPods have great font rendering on the OF, but I don't know if they're rendering from bitmaps or if they actually have an OpenType (or subset thereof) renderer.

[karashata]

If it's safe to hazard a guess, I'd guess the iPods are either using a TrueType font renderer (or comparable) or use a custom font set and its own renderer.

On a similar note, I own an iriver Clix2 and it uses TTF and OTF fonts and allows a user to set a font for the UI out of any loaded onto it.

[terrence1019]

karashata, you made so excellent fonts!  

[karashata]

Bah!  They might be half decent fonts for small screened DAPs, but I'm sure someone could do better, and could make more than just 10 and 12 pixel high fonts for DAPs with larger, higher resolution screens.  There are very many fonts out there on the web and the conversion tools available somewhere on the wiki are pretty decent, anyone with lots of time on their hands and willing to spend some of it finding fonts they want to have could probably do much more than I've done.

[terrence1019]

Bah!  They might be half decent fonts for small screened DAPs, but I'm sure someone could do better, and could make more than just 10 and 12 pixel high fonts for DAPs with larger, higher resolution screens.  There are very many fonts out there on the web and the conversion tools available somewhere on the wiki are pretty decent, anyone with lots of time on their hands and willing to spend some of it finding fonts they want to have could probably do much more than I've done.

oh, karashata, you're so modest