Message-Id: <m0xDTe7-000S1mC@inti.edu.ar>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <salvador AT natacha DOT inti DOT edu DOT ar>
From: "Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET)" <salvador AT inti DOT edu DOT ar>
Organization: INTI
To: Shawn Hargreaves <Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 15:26:52 +0000
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Subject: Re: Fonts in Allegro
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Shawn Hargreaves <Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> wrote:
> JH writes:
> >I was just wondering how to create font files which are to be used with
> >Allegro 2.2, please e-mail me if you know how,
> 
> There are lots of GRX format .FNT files in the libgrx distribution. 
Please don't get me wrong Shawn I'll just point a detail here:

The .FNT files from GRX have a lot of problems:
1) Copyright, you must keep the copyright notice and show it in your docs. 
Normally is dropped by the Allegro grabber. 
2) Quality: The fonts are taked from some real fonts, that means: they are 
bitmaped but comes from scalable fonts. So small fonts are low quality ones.
3) Huge size: Now if you plan to use the big ones (>28 p) you'll face a problem 
from Allegro. Allegro uses a very flexible way to store proportional fonts, 
but as it support multicolor fonts the memory needed tends to be huge. The only 
solution here is to write a set of functions for allegro to support packed 
fonts.
I did a program that converts .FNT files into C code so then you can store the 
.o files in a library and link the fonts you want in your .EXE. I succesfully 
converted a lot of 8x8 and 8x16 fonts but when I tried to convert the 
proportional fonts (char40b.fnt in particular) I saw huge problems. My library 
started to be over than 1Mb for a few fonts and gcc refused to compile some 
files!, yes! sources of 700Kb weren't compiled with 120Mb of virtual memory ?!. 
Anyways the problem is that this fonts takes around 300Kb when the original 
files are aound 25Kb.

I guess you can get very good small fonts with tt2pcx or converting 8x16 fonts.

That's only an opinion, and I really like the bitmaped fonts of Allegro, but we 
need some way to support proportional packed fonts (1 bit per pixel).

SET
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