Fonts.

i) What Font formats does RISC OS use? ( I.E Is the metrics information documented)

ii) What ‘free’ design software exists? (I know there is commerical software that understands RISC OS outline fonts)?

iii) Is there an easy method of converting Windows type fonts to RISC OS ones? (assuming the font license allows this)

i) The RISC OS font format. It’s documented in the appendices of PRM4, I expect. Also, the changes for UCS fonts are documented at http://www.iyonix.com/32bit/fonts.shtml

ii) I guess FontEd counts as ‘free’. It’s bundled with the OS, probably in $.Utilities.

iii) Truetype fonts are easily converted—use TTF2f to produce fonts for use with the UCS font manager.

At some point, I think the Font Manager should grow native support for TTF/OTF fonts. That rather requires someone having the time and inclination to do such a thing. I currently don’t.

For reference, FontEd’s in a rather odd place in our repository: castle/RiscOS/Sources/Video/Render/Fonts/Manager/Utils/!FontEd. It probably should be moved somewhere independent of the font manager and automatically built and packaged on our downloads page, but there are 101 other things we need to be doing…