Porterhouse font as TrueType or OpenType

ISTR the archaic font designer tool on Arthur and RISC OS 2 did allow character design using beziers and scaffold lines, but its output was the bitmap font for a given XEig,YEig – that was the only format supported by the Font Manager back then.

I think Neil had the idea to implement the Outline Font Manager shortly after the RISC OS 2 ROMs had gone off, having found that the 8 MHz ARM was up to rasterising from outlines to a bitmap cache. Didn’t the OFM make an appearance with Acorn DTP? Also I think there was a one-way conversion from old design format to new outline format in the newer font design tool.

Didn’t the OFM make an appearance with Acorn DTP?

Yes, Acorn DTP had outline fonts.

in the newer font design tool.

Is that FontEd?

could someone create a bitmap image with all the characters in it so I could recreate it using a Mac font editor?

Edit The file above is missing the Euro, and other characters. The correction is below.

How wide of the mark is this? It is a first go which can be further tweaked, or binned.

Is Bitfonter the sort of tool that might be used

How wide of the mark is this? It is a first go which can be further tweaked, or binned.

That doesn’t look quite right to me, there’s no Euro symbol for starters, which I lovingly created when Porterhouse was (re)added to RISC OS 5. If only there was some meta data which described changes made…

The original sprites are in there should anyone have a requirement to turn them into something. The only item I’m scratching my head about is what I did with the conversion tool, but it was only a hacked up bit of BASIC and the chances of finding it are low after 5 years!

That doesn’t look quite right to me, there’s no Euro symbol for starters

oops. User ineptitude, found it now. I can post an update but it seems there could be a better way.

That doesn’t look quite right to me,

Looks like a VDU font as well. Surely at, say, 12pt it would have some variation in thicknesses?

Many thanks David, at least I now have a copy I can use to recreate the font. The original font didn’t have a Euro symbol because the Euro didn’t exist then.

And Rick, yes it is a VDU font designed for the very low res displays we had in the 1980s. The basic structure of the font uses a five horizontal pixel by seven vertical pixel grid for the main UC characters, not including the descenders and accents. Because the horizontal resolution of the screen was twice the vertical resolution (640 vs 256) I could use “half pixels” on the corners to round it slightly and also make the diagonals smoother.

Many thanks David, at least I now have a copy I can use to recreate the font. The original font didn’t have a Euro symbol because the Euro didn’t exist then.

There was more than just the Euro missing, it was the first character in each line. This is a full correction. Spacing between characters has been increased.

Bug in FontEd or the font…?

FontEd’s documentation implies that one can load outline fonts, IntMetrics files, or bitmap fonts.

Trying to load PorterHouse results in the error Illegal metrics file - char map entry[0] = 0 (max allowed -1) because the font does not begin with the magic value “FONT” so the software tries to interpret it as an IntMetrics file.

Loading the IntMetrics file works, but without any font visible.

Bug in the documentation, I think.

[Edit: I go have a look at the Pi as soon as I can…]