Another solution, used by Dennis Ortiz-Lopez and others, is to create several fonts that can be layered, one on top of the other. The base font would be the letter shape itself (in solid B&W form). The next font would be, say, a bevel effect, also in solid B&W form, which would be printed in a greyscale or any color determined by the user of the font. Another font could be an outline layer, an inline layer, etc.

Ortiz-Lopez' work can be seen at:

http://ortiz-lopez.com/index.html

David

Excoffon's Calypso is a great example of
using halftones to create depth.

Stephen

If you are going to experiment along the lines of halftone screens, it might be an idea to experiment with line patterns instead of dot patterns, it might help reduce file sizes / complexity and can look rather nice if done well.

As for bitmap fonts, they do exist, certainly on the Mac, and can be edited with packages like FontLab's BitFonter (http://www.fontlab.com/html/bitfonter.html). I can't say i am too hot on the technology side of these though - perhaps you can get some useful info by downloading the manual for it?

Enjoy

Hi guys, I think you are great, your post has really been helpful, and now am ready to go to work again. The font I am working on is quite unusual and it might raise some issue, I'll let you know when it is ready.

Thanx a lot

A PC(basic) bitmap font tool can be found at:
http://www.downlinx.com/proghtml/303/30338.htm

One way you could do is to utilize some halftone tricks... dots of different sizes.

The font might get heavy though (filesize and processor/memory use)