For those of us who deal with the preservation of old systems, I was wondering if you could add a feature to import low-resolution font bitmaps, as were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. I create my own tools to extract the bitmaps, but from then on a little help would be great, in order to automatically isolate characters, and decide what to do, like:
Preserve the pixelated “retro look” (i.e. pixels should be converted to square or rectangular vector shapes at a given ratio, and all hints should aim to respect the original 8x8, 5x7 or whatever the grid was)
or
Help “vectorize” the bitmap
My specific need relates to conversions of Commodore 8-bit and Amiga fonts. For preprocessing I use this tool a lot, which can export in a variety of formats:
Of course I would not expect you to load Amiga bitmapped font files directly, but if you wanted to do that, I would be happy to help with source code and documentation.
Have you tried the Pixel Import mode on the import bitmap dialogue?
You mean one character at a time? I was looking for a way to import entire ranges of characters within a bitmap. Like, selecting a rectangle with the mouse, telling it the box size, and start and stop characters to map to.
One can only import one image at a time from the dialogue, but if you do one you can save the settings as the default, then use drag and drop from Windows Explorer to import a whole load of individual bitmaps at once.
If all glyphs are in a single bitmap, see Scanning an Entire Alphabet for a quicker method than using the import image dialogue. Again, set your defaults to pixel mode first.
The linked thread describes copying and pasting from a single bitmap one character at a time, but if you have an image editor that allows you to slice up the bitmap into a grid of images you can export those slices to a folder and then use the drag and drop method to import them all at the same time.