For some reason, this jumped off the newsgroup/list and onto private e-mail (Ken hit the wrong button on his newsreader, I think.)
Ken Krugler wrote: >> Well, what bothers *me* is that creating a high-density bitmap font >> requires a corresponding low-density font with the same dimensions. > > What tool set are you using?
Mostly tools of my own making, but for fonts, PilRC reading hand-edited files. In a future version the PalmOS fonts will probably be generated, though, since right now I have a few fonts duplicated in incompatible formats.
>> When >> making fonts that aren't fricken huge (like the default fonts are), you >> don't want the dimensions the same. > > Why would you want the low-density fonts to have different metrics? It > sounds like you're actually using a different effective point size when > drawing on a low-density screen. Is the issue that you _must_ include a > low-density bitmap with the high density font?
Yes, that's the issue. Well, part of the issue; the real issue is that the drawing routines are fairly narrow-minded. Also, the half-size-font requirement means no odd widths, although that hasn't been an issue for me yet.
On high-density screens, I use ANSI-8x12 (known as 'Terminal' in Windows). On low density screens at that size, any monospace font is guaranteed to be illegible, so I use a variably-spaced font. And there is no way to make a single-density analogue for ANSI-8x12; that would be 4x6 *monospace*, which is too narrow for many characters. The font I use for low-density screens is 4x6 but variadic, which is the smallest legible font size possible.
Besides, I use dynamically flowed text with tab stops and my own widgets exclusively, so there's no reason to even think about sacrificing font quality.
Actually, what I would *really* like is to be able to read fonts independently of their density, so a user on a high-density screen could use a 4x6u (8x12px) font and a user on a low-density screen could use it as an 8x12u (still 8x12px) font. Or the high-density user might even use the 4x6u font doubled as an 8x12u. If I were writing to a framebuffer this would be easy, but unfortunately I'm stuck using Palm's quite limited drawing functions, and I might end up doing something ugly like generating a bunch of duplicate fonts.
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