Unicode and fnt files

[Tex]

Is there a standard to use FNT files with Unicode? (being able to display characters above FFh)

I notice in the Microsoft Spec that versions 2 and 3 appear to only support values 00h to FFh.

[hukka]

Correct; the maximum amount of glyphs in a FNT/FON is 255, which is dumb but there you go.

Apparently it's possible to put bitmap data into a TTF font, though, which is something I've been meaning to look at...

[Booley]

Hello hukka,

Thanks for making the Fony editor available for free. I will send you a donation as soon as I can afford it, within a couple months. For now I'd like to offer this link.

www.microsoft.com/typography/tools/tools.htm

Of particular note is the "SBIT32" program, which gives access to the bitmap data within TrueType fonts. It requires the bitmaps to be in the .BDF format, which is how I found Fony via Google. I'm about to test out the embedding of bitmaps into my TTF, and I'll share the results tomorrow.

[hukka]

Hi Booley,

I was aware of SBIT32, but hadn't gotten around to trying it myself. Did you try it; how'd it work?

[ulrich bauer]

Would it be possible somehow when importing a TTF to specify which characters to include. I am working on an embedded solution, where I can use different FNT files for different Unicode ranges. So I have a file for the characters 0-255, another for latin extended 1 (256-383), another one for cyrillic, greek etc. But lately, I was checking out some east asian scripts, and I would need for example to import korean precomposed characters into a number of FNT files.

I.e. Import TTF, select characters 0xAC00-0xADFF and import them in one file, go on with 0xAE00 - 0xAFFF etc.

[hukka]

Sept 13, 2012 12:46:46 GMT 2 @ulrich bauer said:

Would it be possible somehow when importing a TTF to specify which characters to include.

Hello,
This is indeed a planned feature, I just haven't managed to get around to implementing it yet.

[Funota]

I'm also super interested in using Fony for editing Unicode chracters, but having separate files for each Unicode range would be a very impractical solution for say Japanese and Chinese (and I assume anything else that needs more than 256 glyphs.

Any plans to have Fony export to something else other than fnt?

[hukka]

Apr 22, 2013 16:30:18 GMT 2 @Funota said:

Any plans to have Fony export to something else other than fnt?

Not currently, I'm afraid. Implementing TTF exporting would require too much time and effort, and I don't have use for such functionality personally.