OK, FlashLoaded appear to have taken over the site, they emailed me with really helpful support and are going to look into both the wrong support address and the font problem so it seems safe to buy from fontsforflash.com

Sorry for the triple post. Fontsforflash.com contacted me directly following this post and told me that the fonts are not intended for use in Photoshop and offered a refund. Personally I've never heard of a bitmap font that can only be used on one application, a font is a font. Incidentally, I checked the font in a trial FontLab against one of the 04b bitmapped classics and found discrepancies.

The 04b fonts are accurately lined up to the guides and grids in the glyph window with only positive values in the metrics. FFF Calypso was not lined up to the grid or guides and had a small negative value of -7 on the left hand side of each glyph.

Most importantly, each pixel of the 04b font is a multiple of 150 or 125 units, in FFF Calypso its the same but the problem characters had at least one point that didn't add up to round multiples of 125. I think its easy to correct but it looks like Photoshop is showing the errors and Flash doesn't detect them.

Overall as fontsforflash say, guaranteed to work as expected in Flash only.

I remember a few years ago there were issues in Flash with «normal» bitmap fonts that would fit pixels perfectly – the counters would fill up. Flash couldn't interpret the outlines correctly. That led to special bitmap fonts for Flash where the bitmap «dots» were a bit smaller (or larger?) than the actual screen pixels; with antialiasing switched off, they would still display as full pixels, but the counters were saved. Something like that. I don't know if this is actually still an issue in Flash today, and I wasn't aware that these fonts don't work right in other apps, but maybe that's what's behind this curious story.

> Personally I’ve never heard of a bitmap font that can
> only be used on one application, a font is a font.

There are some very tricky aspects to grayscale pixelfont design, involving how an application decides exactly what shade of gray a pixel should be. Photoshop and Flash do it differently, and it's quite difficult to figure out a scheme that yields the same results in both apps.

Until they pulled the plug I worked with a company called Ultrafonts. Unlike others, they had figured out the technical issues, and Mana* was one of the resultant fonts; it works identically in both Photoshop and Flash. I actually have the source code to the Ultrafonts software, but I've never tried firing it up.

* http://www.themicrofoundry.com/manademo/

hhp