Truetype Font File (ttf) Download

[Shawnna Franz]

Myprogram (win32, Delphi) needs to display special chars in some columns of a table. To do that I use a special font for those columns. I got the font from my client. It is a .FON font. It works good on the screen but I often get problems as soon as I want to use it to print something.

I would like to convert this .FON font into to truetype font (.TTF) to avoid the problems. I don't care if the font does not scale good. I should just looks exactly the same when used on the screen with the same size as the default size of the original font.Do someone know a way to do that?

Edit: Ideal would be to get a truetype font where each pixel of the original font is converted into a vectorial black square (I tested by redrawing a few chars manually, it would works as I want).

Edit 2, solution used: Using FontForge + Autotrace and then making corrections manually I was able to get a vector font that follow the outline of the pixels of the bitmap font. This vector font scales somewhat better than the original font and solve my printing problems. See accepted post for details.

Select all characters and start an autotrace while holding the shift key so that you can enter parameters for autotrace. I used following parameters, which improved the recognition of the outline of the pixels but I didn't found the perfect parameters:

I know this question is old, but for what it is worth I was able to easily convert an old .fon to .ttf using PixFont. I ran it as an administrator (no installs - an old school executable in place) and it generated a good TTF even though the original .fon was missing some correct glyphs.

Using FontForge I was able to generate a corresponding truetype font, which gives exactly the same chars as the original font when used at the good size. May be I still need to tweak some options, because I used my original font at size=11. The new font works good only at size=10.5, which is impossible to use in delphi. The font looks really horrible at every other size.

Apparently it uses a possibility to store bitmap fonts in a truetype-font. The resulting font doesn't have the problems I had with the bitmap fonts, but it is completly blank on the printer so that it doesn't solve my problem.

A note about FontForge:I didn't manage to install the Windows Version of FontForge (based on cygwin). Instead of that I Installed Portable Ubuntu Tres, which is a linux version that works on Windows. It's easy to install: unzip the file and start the exe. Then choose System->Administration->Add/Remove Applications and search for FontForge and install it (administrator password is 123456). I got FontForge version 20090622 installated.

I found that the easiest route to getting a good TTF version of a FON is to use one of the free online bitmap font editors. You have to manually enter each glyph, but the process is much simpler than coming to grips with FontForge. There are two editors that I know of, and they both produce TTFs that work fine on Windows and Linux.

FontStruct requires registration and uses a Flash interface. I was able to make new fonts quite fast once I got used to the interface. (It might be coincidence, but I noticed an uptick in spam on the email account I used to register.)

Both editors set the line spacing automatically. A trick to get the spacing you want is to add a high pixel on one character, then use a vector font editor to remove it from the TTF. (Type light works well and is much easier to use than FontForge.)

But, I suddenly found that Vertopal (a free file converter) has a fon to ttf converter and several other font converters, it quickly converted fon to ttf with the same original characters and the correct size.

A possibility might be to use the command line tool SBIT32 fom Microsoft. It's easy to convert the .FON file into a .BDF file using FontForge. But then you need to write a metrics file (.MET). I didn't try it, because I suppose that I would get a truetype-font with embedded bitmaps font, and it is possible to generate such fonts directly with FontForge (type "(faked) MS bitmap only sfnt (ttf)" under File->Generate Fonts).

There are more points than needed, this can be resolved by using Element\Simplify\Simplify, this will simplify the outlines. In this specific case of the outlines being made of only horizontal and vertical lines, this operation should be lossless.

It's automated, making it much easier for fonts with tons of characters than redrawing all the characters manually. This should definitely be useful for anyone who drew bitmap glyphs and has a valid bitmap font file but cannot use it yet (Microsoft's .fon format does not support Unicode, and many applications fail to properly utilize true bitmap fonts).

I found myself searching for these fonts to use with a project I am working on. Cringing at the thought of manually editing all of the glyphs as mentioned in the other answers, I continued to search. Eventually I stumbled across a site which has the original font as well as some newer .ttf variants. If you don't care that some of the glyphs have been remapped (they are all still present) this is a nice alternative: Oldschool PC Fonts. As an added bonus for me these support extended Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew scripts plus a bunch of additional glyphs and Unicode symbols.

One of the annoying aspects of LaTeX is the limited number of fonts that come by default, and the pain involved in making new fonts 'LaTeX' ready. I have a collection of truetype fonts that I'd like to prepare for use, and I definitely want to make sure I have vector versions of these fonts (i.e not type 3/bitmapped versions). Is there a relatively painless way to do this ?

The only drawbacks (as far as I am aware) are that you can only generate .pdf files and that you need a sufficiently new TeX distribution (TeX Live 2009 should work for XeTeX and Tex Live 2010 for LuaTeX).

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