Pixelated / non-aliased fonts - how to make?

[swerdmurd]

Hello!

I've been making blitted, bitmap-style fonts for use in game engines for quite a while now. I'm curious - is there a way to make this type of font for use as a general windows font? By this I mean a font like Terminal - exact pixelated edges, no aliasing or tranparency (solid color), exact control, pixel-wise, of letter size, horixontal and vertical spacing, etc.

Example - I'm trying to port over my Gameboy-style font. It's an 8x8 font, including vertical and horizontal spacing - meaning no letter is larger than 7x7, with a built in pixel's-worth of padding on all sides. I made a font that seemed to fulfill this criteria - but it doesn't appear appropriate unless it's size 24 or larger. It's also fixed-width as noted - everything occupies 8 pixels horiontally.

Ideally, this font SHOULD look perfect at font size 8, and double-size perfect at 16, triple-size perfect at 24, etc. Any idea how best to achieve this? I'd be happy to include the ttf (made using Fontstruct, and exported) if anyone would care to take a look. I'm brand new to Typelight, and I couldn't find any tutorials suited to this need.

Thanks!

[Allan Murray]

Bear in mind that when a font is displayed, it is scaled relative to the em unit size (select metrics from the fonts menu). So a font displayed at 8ppem (pixels per em) would be scaled down so that its em unit size is 8 pixels high.

Also bear in mind that 8 point is not equal to 8 pixels unless the screen resolution is 72 dpi (Macs). Windows normally has 96 dpi.

1 point = 72th of an inch. So 8 ppem on Windows would be 6 point.

Whether the font is antialiased generally depends on the system settings. I would suggest adding a 'Do nothing' setting to the gasp hinting table (on the font menu), for all ppem ranges (add an entry with max ppem=65535).