Re: [dev] Font edition tooling

From: Ben Woolley <tautolog_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2015 23:23:50 -0800

Sent from my iPhone
> On Dec 23, 2015, at 1:03 PM, mpu <quentin_AT_c9x.me> wrote:
>
> quentin_AT_c9x.me (mpu) wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I wrote some tools to design bitmap fonts. Maybe you'll
>> be interested.
>>
>> http://github.com/mpu/fnt/
>
> I feel bad that this whole discussion ended up being about
> legal matters. Because some people seem unable to simply
> copy-paste 200 lines of code when it does not have a
> license, I put one in the Github repo.
>
> I think I'm starting to understand __20h__'s "copy me if you
> can", maybe it should be "copy me if you dare".
>
> To be honest I feel a bit stupid putting a license on four
> glorified while loops. I'm not sure what is the limit for
> requiring a license, do we need to license awk one-liners
> when we paste them on IRC? If not, what was the problem
> with my repository. The four files provided as source are
> really almost one-liners.
>
> I wonder if the people who just complained about (lack of)
> licensing are really concerned about it or are just of the
> same kind of people that find it unacceptable to write
> (x - 'a') in C.
>
> Hopefully we can now talk about what I submitted.
>
>

What you provided is more than code, but a highly compatible and straightforward approach, and the foundations for a standard, at least for a suite of tools. Although those things are not copyrightable, having the reference implementation be safe to copy is very valuable to their propagation. That is why I asked about a license.

I made two fonts from nothing in a couple hours, and am only having one issue I think with the SWIDTH in the generated bdf, which should be trivial to fix once I have figured out what I am missing. I also have a bunch of ideas for tools that work with this simple format you made. Since it has the potential to be a standard, I wanted to make sure that the license was sorted out before I invested a bunch of time on it.

Basically, what I am trying to do is make a font that is 7px high and 6px wide, with a baseline as the second pixel from the bottom, and only 5 usable pixels wide (the 6th pixel is always unset, the chars are 6px apart, and the 6th pixel separates the 5px wide chars). To do that, I created a 6x7 folder, and put BASELINE=1 in Settings. I ended up having xfontsel render only 4px from the left, even though the chars are rendered 6px apart properly. I think the SWIDTH needs to be something else. Any ideas?

Thank you,

Ben

> Cheers,
>
> -- mpu
>
Received on Thu Dec 24 2015 - 08:23:50 CET

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