Hi folks, I wrote some tools to design bitmap fonts. Maybe you'll be interested.
http://github.com/mpu/fnt/ (I know, it's Github, I'll move it some place reasonable if there's interest.) Two C programs, 'edit' and 'view', allow respectively to edit one glyph and view a text with the font currently being designed. The 'view' tool can get bitten by SIGHUP signals to refresh the view. To do this automatically when the font gets changed, I made a little shell script that uses inotify-tools to monitor the font directory energy-efficiently, it is 'watch.sh'. When done editing use the '2bdf.sh' shell script to convert the font to BDF (usable by X11). It does not work for fonts wider than 8 pixels, though, so you might have to patch it. The font format is I think suckless, a font is simply stored in a directory named WxH where W and H are the pixel dimensions of the font. Each glyph is then stored as an ASCII file named U+NNNN where NNNN is the Unicode codepoint of the glyph. Here is what is stored in 7x10/U+0041 (glyph 'A') for the leon font ....... .xxx... x...x.. x...x.. xxxxx.. x...x.. x...x.. x...x.. ....... ....... That way, a font can be stored using git and edited using standard text-editors in a reasonable way. I now use the font (leon) packaged in the git repo, it was pretty fun to design. -- mpu
