Steven: Yeah, I gotta think it all through, hmm... The unicode support should be done by denominating each character not by one byte but rather a string, capturing its name, or a unicode code. And yes - alpha channel shouldn't be embedded but rather separate (but not taking the file space neither). So, I guess, it may (optionally) follow after the bitmaps definitions. Updated editor is in progress (but stopped on some trivial bug in saving... Delphi code, btw).

So, You may already suggest it - the problem is, nowadays I happen not to have too much time (or zest, as I deny to admit) investing in it. :-(

However, I don't mind passing the code to some one else with enthusiasm to keep developing.

Hmm unicode support would be nice, I'm not sure how good alpha would be (mind you I'm comming from the point of a DS homebrew developer here where pixel plotting is a slow process), but adding some form of compression would be nice - even if it was only for the mono coloured fonts. Thinking a bit more about the alpha bit, it would be useful to an extent, but you would have problems as there is one font that uses a 256 palette entry (402). An updated font editor would also be nice, I'm currently using a small utility to convert bitmap files to bmf files, with a lot of assumptions on the font glyph data. Sorry for all this talk about DS specific uses of the font, but that's where I'm currently using the fonts that are on this site.

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??