oggzee: exactly - i was even planning to implement it just like that, but somehow it didn't happen (perhaps because i was so lazy) ;-)

however, nothing prohibits me to design version 2.0 of this format, to include both the transparency and some other things (like unicode characters, for example).

you seem to be interested, i'll write you.

If max colors used is 32 that means only 5 out of 8 bits for character data pixels are used, right? That leaves 3 bits unused, which could be used for the alpha channel. 3 bits would give a scale of 0-7 which should be good enough for antialiasing...

It's a pitty BMF fonts don't carry alpha/transparency info as it would allow for proper antialiasing. A lot of fonts here are antialiased to a black background and so they are not suitable to be used over a colored background. The shades of grey could be extrapolated to the alpha channel, but since some fonts are actually colored, that can't be done automatically and reliably for all the fonts... Of course changing the BMF format is out of the question as well i suppose ;)

i'm thinking about a proper design renovation of this site.
all: what do you think about that?

800 fonts by now

p.s. by "downgrading" I mean the fabulous feature of TTFonts to be scalable (which BMFs can't be). By the way, thanks for question (in several million years) :-)

nope. The thing about bitmap fonts is that they can bear colours (in fact, whole bitmaps). Converting TTF to BMF would actually be a kind of downgrading. And besides, you have much more apps to work with TTF than with bitmap fonts..

Is there an application (that you know) that can convert TTF to BMF??

60000 fetches

789 fonts by now