Re: Question on bitmap fonts
Re: Question on bitmap fonts
- Subject: Re: Question on bitmap fonts
- From: Aki Inoue <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:18:29 -0700
Tobia,
It appears that this is the intended behavior.
The font contains glyphs that extend beyond the ascender line (the
accented glyphs) and Cocoa automatically adjusts the default line
height accordingly to avoid baseline shifts.
So, basically the system, tools you're using to convert the font, and
the font itself are all working as designed.
Aki
On 2008/03/31, at 9:23, Tobia Conforto wrote:
Hello
After 1000 messages to this list and no reply, I'm resubmitting my
question about bitmap fonts, hoping to get any bit of help or any
pointer at all (docs, other mailing lists, etc.)
Basically, I would like to know what are the best practices and
recommended programs for preparing bitmap fonts for use in Cocoa
applications. I'm also reporting what is probably a bug in either
OS X or the available font editors.
If there is a list better suited to this question, please point me
to it.
I'm trying to convert the well known X11 fixed unicode fonts to a
format usable in Cocoa text editors and terminal programs. These
fonts are available under a free license on Markus Kuhn's website: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
and are provided in source BDF format.
I tried using the free editor Fontforge to convert 9x18.bdf into a
so-called (by Fontforge) "Apple bitmap-only .dfont" format. Mostly
it works, but I've run into a problem that Fontforge's programmers
can't solve. See this thread on their list:
http://www.nabble.com/BDF-to-Apple-bitmap-only-dfont,-wrong-line-height-td15155775.html
The problem is that the generated dfont is rendered by OS X with 4px
of additional ascent (or line-height) and we can't figure out where
it comes from. If I convert only the ASCII subset of the original
Unicode font, the line-height is correct. As soon as I add more
than a couple of non-ASCII characters, the 4px bug comes out.
I tried doing the same conversion using a trial version of the
commercial BitFonter 3.0 editor ($500) and I got the same results as
with Fontforge.
I looked into the .dfont file with a hex editor, using this manual
as a reference http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/TTRefMan/ but I
couldn't find anything out of place.
Here is a zip http://gruppo4.com/~tobia/osx-font-problem.zip where
I've put two OS X dfont files I created from 9x18.bdf, using
Fontforge, plus a text file with the font tables I extracted using
the hex editor.
In "test3" I converted the full Latin 1 charset (Unicode points <
256) and it shows the 4px bug; in "test7" I deleted all glyphs other
than ASCII and a couple of Latin 1 accented letters, and it displays
correctly in all Cocoa apps.
What am I doing wrong? What's different in the two files? Can you
replicate this bug? Is this a bug in OS X, a weird setting in the
original BDF, or a bug shared between Fontforge and BitFonter?
Can you think of any workaround or alternative program I could try?
Tobia
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