I wanted to use the Rail Model font (where the k/K letter is क/क : http://code.google.com/p/railmodel/downloads/list) as a console font (even for the Bios) for a Linux distro either custom or modded. It needed to be converted into a "bitmap" font. Wynand Marais accepted this and the result for download is at http://sites.google.com/site/RamchAprilMay

The folder contains, subfolders saying 1024, 256 and 512 with each of the subfolders containing awd, pwd and tga files. Wynand Marais, the person who produced the bitmap font says:

“256, 512 and 1024 maps to 2^N boundaries used on many video cards for texture sizes. ...these sizes are specified as the minimum (256) where the font is not really clearly visible, the "nice" size (512) which give a good balance of texture size and glyph resolution, and the biggest 1024 which is generally the upper limit... When rendering bitmap fonts, you want to select the texture that gives you the lest amount of scaling between the glyph size in the texture which is either 256/16, 512/16 or 1024/16 in order to give you the least amount of distortion. For example, if you want a font height of 16pixels, you would just use the glyphs directly from the 256 image.

The ".awd" is the "advance width" file. Every-time you write a glyph, you need to advance the text cursor a …[certain] distance before drawing the next glyph. This file contains this information for each glyph in the image effectively supporting variable width fonts.

The ".pwd" file is the "physical width" file which contains the maximum width of each glyph in the image. This information is used when you are calculating maximum line widths, or are working with rendering individual glyphs to ensure you achieve proper centering.”

If there are any techies on this forum that could test this, I would be interested to find out what they have to say.