Bitfonter/Photofont: http://photofont.com/

Thanks Ralf, just what I needed. But $499 seems a bit too much for such a thing. Any alternative?

TextEdit/Windows Editor!
Photofonts are just PNG images linked together with an XML file.

I'm not sure I follow you. Do you mean I could program it in TextEdit? I'm noob when it comes to programming so I could not do that :(

What Ralf is hinting to can be observed if you download one of the example fonts. You can open them in TextEdit (or another pure ASCII editor) and examine them at will. They appear to contain an XML header in some propriety format, followed by encoded data of the actual images.

Not something you could program off-hand (although the $499 seems a bit steep).

I seem to be missing the actual how-to-use as a font, though -- does a Mac recognize these files as a valid font type?

There is a "Use them" section at http://www.photofont.com/photofont/use/

You can currently use photofonts in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator using the free Photofont Start plugin. Plugins for Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress are currently close to be released, as is Photofont WebReady, an application that allows web designers to produce dynamic web page headlines using photofonts (using a mechanism similar to sIFR).

Adam