Help with making fonts

[Chuck McKnight]

I'm sorry if this has been discussed before or is posted elsewhere, but I have not been able to find anything.

How do I make fnt fonts? I understand how to convert fonts from ttf to fnt, but is there a way to simply draw the characters as they will appear? This would make sense to me as the fonts seem to be pixel based rather than scalable. Thanks!

[crzyboyster]

Read these wiki pages:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CreateFonts
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/FontFormat
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/RockboxFontConvertor (most important, in your case)

[zajacattack]

This isn't a rockbox question. I suggest you use Google to find something.

[crzyboyster]

Sorry, I misread your question Chuck McKnight. For making a font, Google is your source and simply be creative after that. Then, just convert it!

[Llorean]

Actually it is a Rockbox question, since the .fnt format we use is custom to us.

[Chuck McKnight]

Ok, I did a little searching and found this little program which makes BDF font files. But then, when I run it through convbdf I get the following error:

Code: [Select]

Error: bad 'FONT'
Error reading font header

 

[eevan]

It's quite easy. Use the FontForge to create a bitmap .bdf font, and then convert it to .fnt using convbdf.exe. If you need the help about using FontForge, read the tutorial pdf from the site. But it's pretty straightforward if you created fonts before.

I use the Fontlab, but it took me just 15 minutes to start working in FontForge. I have modified the Namil-8, adding cyrillic glyphs and some punctuation. Ask if you need help.

Cheers

[Chuck McKnight]

I have the .bdf font working correctly, it's convbdf that seems to be having the problem.

[Llorean]

Except that the error message suggests that there's something wrong with the BDF's header. It bears investigating, because it could mean something's wrong with convbdf or something's wrong with the .bdf file. Unfortunately, it's outside things I know enough about to be helpful.

[eevan]

Look at the header of the generated BDF. It should look something like this:

Code: [Select]

STARTFONT 2.1
FONT Namil__8
SIZE 8 78 78
FONTBOUNDINGBOX 8 8 0 0
COMMENT "Generated by fontforge, http://fontforge.sourceforge.net"
COMMENT ""
STARTPROPERTIES 5
DEFAULT_CHAR 0
POINT_SIZE 360
FONT_DESCENT 0
FONT_ASCENT 8
COPYRIGHT "Public domain font.  Share and enjoy."
ENDPROPERTIES
CHARS 288

Convbdf is complaining it can't parse the header. Everything works here for bdfs generated by FontForge.

[Chuck McKnight]

This is what the header looks like.

Code: [Select]

STARTFONT 2.1
COMMENT Exported by Fony v1.3.5
FONT 
SIZE 12 96 96
FONTBOUNDINGBOX 9 11 0 -3
STARTPROPERTIES 6
COPYRIGHT ""
RESOLUTION_X 96
RESOLUTION_Y 96
FONT_ASCENT 9
FONT_DESCENT 3
DEFAULT_CHAR 0
ENDPROPERTIES
CHARS 256

I wonder if it is because there is nothing defined after "FONT"?

I'll change that and see what happens.

[eevan]

Ok, you forgot to name your font, but also the COMMENT in not wrapped with double-quotes and maybe the RESOLUTION_X and Y properties are not recognised by convbdf.
But I think that the comment is causing the trouble.

[Chuck McKnight]

Well, good and bad news. I added content for the "FONT" and "COPYRIGHT" fields which allowed the conversion to work. Problem is, when I copied the font to my Sansa, all the characters were scrambled. lol

Oh well, I guess I'll take another shot at that Fontforge program.

[eevan]

You need to properly encode a font. I used the unicode

[Chuck McKnight]

Ah, now it's working!

Thanks!