i’m trying to create a font from scratch using bitmap files of each glyph.
those bmp’s are extracted from a subtitle font that’s used in a dvd player so the resulting ttf font is meant to be exclusively a subtitle font. that is, it should only have one font size and already with the black border or outline incorporated like in the bitmaps.
the difficulty i’m having is that when importing an image file i don’t know what value to insert in the size field to make it look exactly like the original glyph image. is there any way to work that out?
besides that, regarding the space among glyphs, the original subtitle font had a glyph used as a spacer that i’ll attach below that i don’t know how to import in the program and of course the issue about where to center the glyph in the grid is also something i can’t figure out.
Truetype fonts are scalable, and your font does not look like a fixed width font.
You can arrive at a suitable value for the multiplier on the glyph tab of the image import dialogue by trial and error. Its not critical, as long as all glyphs are scaled by the same factor. The glyphs can be scaled using a transformation later anyway. What is more important, is the resolution of the bitmap to get sufficient detail.
You might want to try the method in my tutorial to speed things up once you have decided on the right multiplier. Aim for a Caps Height of about 1500 to 1600 for your font, which has shorter descenders than the default New Font template font.
When you import a bitmap, it is positioned at 0,0 on the grid. You will need to adjust side bearings to give your font some spacing. You can use Autometrics from the Tools menu to make them all the same initially, but the shape of the letters affects the white space that they need on each side, so some manual adjustment is always necesssary. Lowercase i and l, for example, need more white space than capital O, V or W.