FontCreator 1.20 Beta

Fluid Byte · Post by **Fluid Byte** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:02 pm

Finally managed to put something together wich is worth showing!

You can guess by name what this is all about so I save myself the hassle of explaing and let this screenshot talk for itself:

You can grab the binaries here: FontCreator.zip

Tell me what you think.

Version 1.01 Beta:

- Frame size is now correctly recalculated when changing font style
- Excluded useless special ASCII symbols 0-31, speeds up performance
- Changed default outline color
- Frame spacing got messed when exceeding maximum character width / height (datatype limitation)
- Minor visual tweaks

Version 1.10 Beta:

- Added PNG/JPEG image encoding; PNG compression is 24Bit (loseless)
- Fixed incorrect image size when exporting
- Fixed incorrect frame spacing when drawing full ASCII set (largest character wasn't calculated)

Version 1.20 Beta:

- Added: Viewport scrolling to display any image portion outside drawing area
- Added: Panel gagdet for option grouping and category splitting
- Added: Full 360° font roation
- Added: JPEG quality can now be set manually
- Added: Display options for drawing either standard, extended or full ASCII set
- Added: Realtime font scaling can now turned off for the sake of performance
- Fixed: Possible crash on some systems when exiting (missing resources wich failed to load/free)
- Changed: Application window is now fully resizable
- Minor visual tweaks

akj · Post by **akj** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:55 am

Hello Fluid Byte,

I very much like your Font Creator, but it has a few problems I would like to bring to your attention via this screenshot:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/akjakj/page8.html

1. You can see that for large font sizes the bitmap image can get garbled.

2. It would be very useful to be able to vary the size of the bitmap image.

3. The frames need to be wider (at least on my PC) as some text is truncated, e.g. the words Underline, Background and Anti-Alias.

4. The word 'Border' in the FontStyle frame should be 'Outline' for compatibility with the 'Colours' frame.

5. I cannot reproduce it, but the program once crashed for no apparent reason.

Fluid Byte · Post by **Fluid Byte** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 12:55 pm

1. You can see that for large font sizes the bitmap image can get garbled.

I was aware of that before but I have no clue why it happens. Maybe some fonts have point size limits, dunno. Need to investigate that further.

2. It would be very useful to be able to vary the size of the bitmap image.

How this should be realized? In form of text boxes where you enter width & height, should the window be resizable or a combination of both?

3. The frames need to be wider (at least on my PC) as some text is truncated, e.g. the words Underline, Background and Anti-Alias.

I'm aware of that too!

Not for every option the frame size is recalculated. So when you enbale bold or underline style it may look squeezed. Not hard to fix though.

4. The word 'Border' in the FontStyle frame should be 'Outline' for compatibility with the 'Colours' frame.

As you wish!

5. I cannot reproduce it, but the program once crashed for no apparent reason.

Hard to do anything without a proper bug description

Anyway, I'm currently at work so I will upload the new version when I'm back home.

akj · Post by **akj** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 1:07 am

Thanks for the 1.10b update, Fluid Byte.
It addresses some of the points I made. Also:

2. I think the window should be resizable. In particular, it should be possible to maximise the window.

5. I can easily live with this, but every time I close Font Editor 1.10b on my Windows ME system it always crashes with the message:
"Fontcreator 1 has caused an error in FONTCREATOR 1.1B.EXE. Fontcreator 1 will now close.".

6. Instead of the checkbox 'Draw full ASCII set' I would like to see 3 (or more) radio buttons captioned something like this:
'Normal set 32..127'
'Extended set 128..255'
'Full set 32..255'
This would enable the codes 128..255 to be viewed at larger font sizes.

Incidently I suggest you take a look at the excellent (and inexpensive) My Handwriting program that turns handwriting or other scanned letters into TrueType fonts:
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/rev ... iting2.htm

Fluid Byte · Post by **Fluid Byte** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 4:43 pm

2. I think the window should be resizable. In particular, it should be possible to maximise the window.

Yeah, I think it's about time to do so. Intentionally I wanted to limit the drawing area to save some performance. Currently I create an image as large as the window and then refresh to have flicker free drawing. But I'm thinking also about adding a 'MDI Frame Window'-like workspace with scrollbars.

5. I can easily live with this, but every time I close Font Editor 1.10b on my Windows ME system it always crashes with the message:
"Fontcreator 1 has caused an error in FONTCREATOR 1.1B.EXE. Fontcreator 1 will now close.".

No clue by what this caused but I will send a debug version asap.

6. Instead of the checkbox 'Draw full ASCII set' I would like to see 3 (or more) radio buttons captioned something like this:
'Normal set 32..127'
'Extended set 128..255'
'Full set 32..255'

Good point, I will add this.

This would enable the codes 128..255 to be viewed at larger font sizes.

This would redundant if you can size the window and scroll the content.

Incidently I suggest you take a look at the excellent (and inexpensive) My Handwriting program that turns handwriting or other scanned letters into TrueType fonts:
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/rev ... iting2.htm

Thanks for pointing this out. I will take a closer look later on.

DarkDragon · Post by **DarkDragon** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 5:10 pm

It's not standard, is it? Normally you have a bitmap font with 128 or 256 characters, 32 chars in one row, 4 or 8 rows total.

Fluid Byte · Post by **Fluid Byte** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 5:25 pm

DarkDragon wrote:It's not standard, is it? Normally you have a bitmap font with 128 or 256 characters, 32 chars in one row, 4 or 8 rows total.

Is there standard for such a common thing? Dunno...

Shoudnl't matter anyway because theres no difference if you have 1 row with 256 characters or 16 rows with 16 characters.

@akj: Could you please test the new version? I think the crash on programm exit should be fixed now.

akj · Post by **akj** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 10:36 pm

Fluid Byte, your font creator program version 1.20b is now really very good. I particularly like the ability to see all the font characters even at 72 pixels tall. Also the program no longer crashes on termination. Many thanks for these changes.

However there are still a few problems:

1. Rotating the font produces a serious resource leakage. I don't think it is a failure to FreeMemory() but more likely to be API related, possibly you are not doing DeleteObject_() after using CreatePen_() or failing to free some similar Windows resource.

2. The rotation indicator rotates in one direction but the font rotates in the opposite direction. This feels strange. Also I think the indicator should initially point vertically upwards and that this should be the zero degrees position.

3. In an earlier post I requested: "The word 'Border' in the FontStyle frame should be 'Outline' for compatibility with the 'Colours' frame". You agreed to change this, but now seem to have reverted back to the original wording. I was wondering why you did that.

4. There are still problems on my PC in that the text is getting truncated. Please see the screenshots at:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/akjakj/page8.html