DOS ain't dead - Font editor Fontana

Laaca

Czech republic,
08.06.2025, 02:00

Font editor Fontana - finaly released! (Announce)

Fontana v1.0
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Fontána (or Fontana) is a bitmap font editor designed for the DOS operating system. It allows you to open, create, edit, and combine a wide range of bitmap font formats. In addition, it supports importing from selected vector formats such as CHR and TTF.

Fontana is compatible with several Unicode-based formats (BDF, TTF, FU) as well as code page based formats (VGA hardware fonts, FN, FNT, V8F, CHR). It also supports multi-font container formats like CPI, FON (used in early Microsoft Windows), and the WFV/WFN formats used in the Wokna32 GUI system.

Thanks to this wide range of supported formats, you can define fonts in both proportional and monospaced modes.

Fontana offers a refined and user-friendly interface. Up to four font files can be opened at the same time, with the ability to transfer characters between them easily. An advanced feature is real-time testing of the font directly in the editing window.
Fontana also includes a "Character Information" panel for Unicode fonts. With a single keypress, you can view the name of any character (e.g. “Cyrillic Capital Letter Zhe”) and the Unicode block it belongs to (e.g. “Cyrillic”). This makes working with multilingual and symbol-rich fonts much easier.
A unique strength of Fontana is its group operations feature. This allows batch transformations to be applied to multiple characters at once — for example:
Increase character width by 1 pixel for all characters from code 32 to 255.
Shift all glyphs in a selected range 3 pixels upwards.
This dramatically speeds up repetitive editing tasks and makes bulk font adjustments efficient and precise.

Created by Laaca
Laaca@seznam.cz
http://www.laaca.borec.cz/blocek (English)
http://www.laaca.borec.cz (Czech)

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DOS-u-akbar!

alexfru USA, 09.06.2025, 07:00 @ Laaca	Font editor Fontana - finaly released! Post reply
	> Fontána (or Fontana) is a bitmap font editor designed for the DOS test (I'm getting some "database error")

alexfru

USA,
09.06.2025, 07:01

@ Laaca

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

> Fontána (or Fontana) is a bitmap font editor designed for the DOS

I've played with it briefly. Here are some findings:
1. it should be able to use a smaller screen resolution, e.g. 640x480
(seems like it's using 800x600?); when I run in in DOSBox-X, it's too
small (my screen is 1920x1080), but if I enable 2x scaling, the
top part ("menu") doesn't fit on the screen
2. it would be nice for it to be able to load bitmap fonts that
have fewer or more than 256 characters; for example, I need a
512-char font, in which I can fit enough chars for many languages,
(btw, EGA and VGA support 512-char text modes) but I couldn't
load such a 512-char bitmap font correctly, Fontána treated
512 8x8 chars as 256 8x16 chars, loading every two chars into
one single-char cell
...

alexfru

USA,
09.06.2025, 07:02
(edited by alexfru, 09.06.2025, 07:34)

@ alexfru

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

> Fontána (or Fontana) is a bitmap font editor designed for the DOS

Somehow I can't post all of the reply as a single message
(getting some "database error").

3. you should use more contrast colors as the char shapes (in the 16x16 table) and other UI elements aren't very legible; I found approximately 40 usable color pairs in about 128 color combinations available for regular text modes (8 darker colors for background and 16 darker and brighter colors for foreground) using this simple technique: 1. List all colors by their luminance using the formula R=.3,G=.6,B=.1 Color GRB Luminance(G=.6,R=.3,B=.1) black 000 0.0 blue 001 0.1 red 010 0.3 magenta 011 0.4 green 100 0.6 cyan 101 0.7 yellow 110 0.9 white 111 1.0 (note, G and R are swapped here) 2. Assuming bright colors' luminance is approx. 30% higher, include bright colors in the list: Color brightness GRB Luminance (+30%) (.6+.3+.1) black X 000 0.0 \ blue 0 001 0.1 \ dark Blue 1 001 0.13 / red 0 010 0.3 / Red 1 010 0.39 \ magenta 0 011 0.4 \ middle Magenta 1 011 0.52 / green 0 100 0.6 / cyan 0 101 0.7 \ Green 1 100 0.78 \ yellow 0 110 0.9 \ Cyan 1 101 0.91 } bright white 0 111 1.0 / Yellow 1 110 1.17 / White 1 111 1.3 / 3. Now choose pairs of colors such that the colors in each pair are approximately 0.6 or more away from each other in terms of luminance.
...

alexfru

USA,
09.06.2025, 07:03

@ alexfru

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

4. btw, the various 8-bit code pages won't be universally applicable
to such fonts, so, at the very least no code pages should be forced
onto a font (it's OK to support the first 128 ASCII chars and
maybe the next 128 from the code page, but if there are more chars
after the first 256, it should be OK, just use the character
index in the font, don't try to force some Unicode code points
on it or let the user supply a table; further, a single char
may be a reasonable representation of multiple code points (e.g.
Latin O, Greek Omicron, Cyrillic O), which is extremely useful
space-wise and a simple binary search can convert from a
code point to the relevant index in the font, suddenly making
512-char bitmap fonts very very practical!

HTH

alexfru USA, 09.06.2025, 07:05 (edited by alexfru, 09.06.2025, 07:35) @ alexfru	Font editor Fontana - finaly released! Post reply
	> may be a reasonable representation of multiple code points (e.g. > Latin O, Greek Omicron, Cyrillic O), which is extremely useful Oh, crap, the database didn't like the Cyrillic O!!!! (this one is Latin) Seems like, the database needs to retire and live in a museum!

Laaca

Czech republic,
09.06.2025, 12:32

@ alexfru

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

Thanks for testing,
You are right, Fontana runs in 800x600, 16bpp. Adaptation to other resolutions would be too time consuming so no, I will not do it.
Have you tried to use the fullscreen option in the DosBox-X?
And I do not understand your notes that Fontana supports only fontf with 256 characters. It is not true, it supports any number of characters from 1 to 65535. What is limited are some file formats, especially V8F and FV (VGA hardware format). Just save and load your work in some other file format.
Colours could be configurable in some future version but it is not a priority now. The feature request about cloning the characters into visualy identical is interresting. For such task I would need some tables with visual equivalents. If it exist you can send it to me.

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DOS-u-akbar!

alexfru

USA,
10.06.2025, 05:51

@ Laaca

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

> You are right, Fontana runs in 800x600, 16bpp. Adaptation to other
> resolutions would be too time consuming so no, I will not do it.

Don't you need to scroll the table if there are more than 256 chars anyway?

> Have you tried to use the fullscreen option in the DosBox-X?

That works, thanks for the tip.

> And I do not understand your notes that Fontana supports only fontf with
> 256 characters. It is not true, it supports any number of characters from 1
> to 65535. What is limited are some file formats, especially V8F and FV (VGA
> hardware format). Just save and load your work in some other file format.

The format is a plain bitmap. 8 bytes per 8x8 character. No header or other metadata. That's the only format I have.

> Colours could be configurable in some future version but it is not a
> priority now.

This is the easiest part to fix/improve.

> The feature request about cloning the characters into visualy
> identical is interresting.

I didn't request that, only hinted at the possible sharing. Sharing
character shapes can get you support for some 40-50 European
languages in Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, plus Hebrew,
all in a 512-char font. Only Celtic, Arabic and Thai from
ISO/IEC 8859 don't fit in that 512-char space.

> For such task I would need some tables with
> visual equivalents. If it exist you can send it to me.

I haven't looked for one. I've constructed a table based on
my observations and needs. I do not expect someone use
the same shapes for the Latin i's and the Greek iotas or
the digit 3 and the Russian capital letter З.
In a low resolution font (8 pixels tall) on a memory-
constrained system it's reasonable. But it may not be for
some other applications.
If you find this interesting, you can review the Unicode tables
and find similar characters. Or, if you have a Windows machine,
fire up "Character Map", choose some frequently used font
and just browse what's in it (there may be some familiar
characters with odd diacritics and variations but you should
get the idea).

SuperIlu

Berlin, Germany,
09.06.2025, 16:14

@ Laaca

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

> operating system. It allows you to open, create, edit, and combine a wide
> range of bitmap font formats. In addition, it supports importing from

nice work!
Does it support GRX fonts (as used by libgrx/mgrx and allegro) as well?

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Laaca

Czech republic,
09.06.2025, 22:00

@ SuperIlu

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

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> nice work!
> Does it support GRX fonts (as used by libgrx/mgrx and allegro) as well?

No, it doesn't. Is it worth to start it support? And does somewhere exist the file format specification?

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DOS-u-akbar!

SuperIlu

Berlin, Germany,
09.06.2025, 22:26

@ Laaca

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

> > nice work!
> > Does it support GRX fonts (as used by libgrx/mgrx and allegro) as well?
>
> No, it doesn't. Is it worth to start it support? And does somewhere exist
> the file format specification?

I did write a (faulty) converter from TTF and BDF to GRX
https://github.com/SuperIlu/GrxFntConv?tab=readme-ov-file

Best thing I found was the actual font writer from mgrx (I did use the source directly which is LGPLd):
https://www.fgrim.com/mgrx/

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Javascript on MS-DOS? Try DOjS https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOjS
Fediverse: @dec_hl@mastodon.social

Laaca

Czech republic,
09.06.2025, 22:52

@ SuperIlu

Font editor Fontana - finaly released!

Post reply

> I did write a (faulty) converter from TTF and BDF to GRX
> https://github.com/SuperIlu/GrxFntConv?tab=readme-ov-file
>
> Best thing I found was the actual font writer from mgrx (I did use the
> source directly which is LGPLd):
> https://www.fgrim.com/mgrx/

Hm, it shouldn't be hard. Sources from MGRX are well understandable. So OK, support for FNT/GRX will be on todo list for the next version.

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DOS-u-akbar!