I'm not following you, I swear! I sort of live here... :->

Delivering hand-made grayscale fonts is a tricky business - I know because I tried for over six years! Then Ultrafonts came on the scene and made it possible - I'll explain below. But first the reasons why it's so tricky: the FON format doesn't support grayscale (it also doesn't support extended encodings BTW), and while the TT format is supposed to allow embedded grayscale bitmaps (for which you can use BitFonter - not a cheap program though) I could never get it to actually work. And then there's the Mac side, which no longer supports any bitmap formats of any kind...

So in the end the only robust way of delivering hand-made grayscale fonts is to make pixelfonts: outline fonts that have funny blocky patterns that render out the desired grays at the right pixel locations when used at a certain size. And making these fonts is no picnic; you can try to do it yourself, but I'd advise against it. Much better would be to sign up as a developer at Ultrafonts.com, which is what I did. They have a converter that takes a filled Photoshop template and spits out a grayscale TT pixelfont, but as a result you have to share any sales profits with them. You might not be interested in more than just using the end result yourself, but know that they would expect a finished font that can be sold retail. Alternatively you might talk them into a no-strings-attached per-conversion fee; but I doubt it will be $40...

If you're not dead-set on doing your own design, here's another idea: as you know I'm considering making a monospaced version of Mana. If you can wait let's say a couple of months, and you're willing to pay me the $40 to speed up the development, I'll make you a Manamono-13 Bold, and you can start coding in high style.

hhp

Hehe... I'm not too worried if you are following me... you have been extremely helpful!

Thanks for explaining how grayscale fonts work. Strange that something that seems so simple is such a hack! I'm in contact with UltraFonts and we'll see how that goes soon, I would like to see how my font looks anti-aliased. I am pretty happy with how it has turned out. I've done a lot of hand tuning, touching most of the characters.

I might google on embedding bitmap fonts into TT, just for kicks.

I do like Mana 13, but 13 would be too large for me. I think Mana Mono 11 would be great though! I need both a regular and a bold version, as my editor bolds certain parts of the code for me. However, I do like the flexibility of being able to edit a font anytime I please.

If you'd like, you can find my font here...

http://n4te.com/tools/LavaMono9.fon

...and here's a little preview...

<img>
Click here if the image doesn't work out: http://n4te.com/tools/LavaMono9.gif

That's a 1-bit (b&w) design - intentional?

> Mana Mono 11 would be great

What's your effective screen dpi?
Also: would you prefer a 1-pixel-stem Regular with a 2-pixel-stem Bold, or 2 and 3?

BTW, I've posted some preliminary trials of my stuff here:
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/53819.html
Let me know what you think.

hhp

Hrant, what is that Georgia-killer you mentioned? (And how many typefaces are you working on at once?)

I don't want to show it just yet. I need to be close enough to finish it so nobody can copy and release it before me. Bitmap fonts are WYSIWYS: What You See Is What You Swipe! :-) And they don't enjoy any copyright protection whatsoever. What I can tell you is that it's 14 pixels (with tall ascenders), it will have a demi weight, and it has somewhat pronounced width differences between some key characters. And of course massive kerning. And it's called Atanasia. Can you figure out why?

Fonts I definitely intend to finish:
Grayscale Bitmap: 3 (the rest of Mana, Coda, Atanasia*)
Outline: 2 (Patria, Baskerville TMF)
But maybe another half-dozen tentative things.
And some font programming jobs (which pay way better than retail).
So about average? Dunno. Maybe we need a "Spill the Beans" thread...

* I can't believe I'm falling for the pedestrian ending-in-"a" trap...

hhp

hrant: Shouldn't that be Baskervilla TMF? And does the TMF stand for "TeX Metafont"? If so, you're a brave soul.

More on topic, I met with Norm Megill of Metamath fame recently. He has done a rather impressive bitmap math font for his project, but has been thinking along the lines of a hand-built grayscale font (likely delivered through one PNG file for each glyph). He may well be willing to do it himself, but could probably use some guidance re tools and the like. Or, if someone wanted to help draw, that would be even better.

Do you mean the ending should be an "a" to avoid lawsuits? If so:
1) Isn't the name way beyond being trademarked? Please do correct me if I'm wrong. Please!
2) I don't think changing one letter would help. :-/

TMF = The MicroFoundry. At least I hope so! BTW, it would have been "TMF Baskerville" but that would throw off human menu scanning. Or is there a way around that?

> delivered through one PNG file for each glyph

I did that six years ago, with a beta of Mana-16. But I used GIFs, which end up smaller, although they don't have the -admittedly quite relevant- provision for embedding a gamma profile.* It was great because no plug-in was needed, and I had a converter that took ASCII text and converted it into really long strings of image declarations.** But you know what the major impediment was in the end? The size of the actual resultant HTML file! :-/

* Assuming that's even supported though. And some browsers don't seem to like PNG.

** And you could still have a seprate real-text version for searching.

What does his font look like?
Like I've explained before, the only real way to deliver a grayscale pixelfont is via UPF*.
BTW, in this case not "draw", but "paint". :-)

* Unless you're crazy enough to superhint an outline font for grayscale! Theoretically possible - never been done.

hhp

hrant: I should have linked Norm's font in my previous comment. Enjoy!

Do you mean the ending should be an "a" to avoid lawsuits?

No, to be consistent with your otherwise perfect end-in-"a" naming convention. Anyone trying to trademark generic Baskerville would be laughed out of court[*].

* After paying lawyers their requisite obscene amounts of money, of course.

But I used GIFs

In this case, the central issue is compositing against colored backgrounds, which Norm uses extensively on his pages. One alternative would be to provide a separate GIF file for each foreground/background color combination, but of course that's quite unpleasant.

Stop with this ending-in-a-footnote already, both of you!*

* Or I'll kill myself.

Raph, that's pretty comprehensive, and useful!
But I thought you said it was grayscale?

> compositing against colored backgrounds

I guess you mean with an 8-bit alpha channel. Because GIFs can have 1-bit transparency.
But anyway with 1-bit (like Norm's stuff) that doesn't even matter.
As for PNG's compression advantage, because of its greater overhead it's not true for really small images.

BTW, does Norm* know about Photofonts?

*

hhp

hrant: sorry if I wasn't clear. He's done 1-bit deep bitmap fonts (for which the GIF transparency works great), and is contemplating making a set of grayscale fonts, largely so that they'll be more consistent with modern browsers' rendering of the surrounding text.

I'm pretty sure Norm does not know about Photofonts - he's a logician, not a typographer, dammit!

:)

[i]TMF = The MicroFoundry. At least I hope so! BTW, it would have been "TMF Baskerville" but that would throw off human menu scanning. Or is there a way around that?[/i]

There probably is a way, since in most apps ITC fonts skip the "ITC" and follow correct alphabetical order for their actual names. Right?

Yes it is b&w on purpose, if only because I am not able to create a greyscale font.

I'm on Windows, using the default 96dpi. My monitors are 19" LCDs at 1280x1024. I am guessing my LCD monitors are fixed at 96dpi?

I think a 1-pixel-stem Regular with a 2-pixel-stem Bold would be best. I don't have any problems with the 1-pixel-stems on my Lava font that I linked to above. My editor bolds nearly half of all the text so I think 2 and 3 would be too much, especially at such a small size.

I don't have time right now to read that entire thread about FireFox and programming fonts, but I will be sure to as soon as I get a chance! I read about half and it is quite interesting.

> I am guessing my LCD monitors are fixed at 96dpi?

Yes, LCDs have fixed resolutions (which is why they look like crap if you force a non-native resolution on them). But some simple pythagorean math seems to yield a dpi of about 86 for your display. Windows however does default to 96dpi, but that's just a nominal/internal thing, not an actual measure.

hhp

Gabriel wrote:
> There probably is a way, since in most apps ITC fonts skip the "ITC" and follow correct alphabetical order for their actual names. Right?

Not actually "most apps" but rather "most Adobe apps."

Two of us came up with a hardcoded list of foundry name prefixes to ignore for font menu sorting purposes. This is built into our font menu building routines.

If anybody else wants their foundry added to the list, just let me know what the foundry is and what abbreviation you use. Please first verify that your prefix isn't already being ignored.

Regards,

T

Ack, at first I thought it might be an Adobe thing too, but then I checked to see in other apps and *mistakenly* thought it was correct there. That's what I get for looking up ITC Kabel, which was accidentaly at the right place, from I and K being so close. Duh. More attention, maybe...