Font Forum

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:

https://www.amigaforever.com/classic/pfm/
(Personal Fonts Maker, by Cloanto)

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?

> 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.

takeos wrote:> 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.

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote: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.