Tiny Font Tool GUI

Update 10/8/2009: 2.0.0.0 A major update of this tool:

• Anti-aliasing is now supported including preview (Ray Molenkamp was the first one who figured out how does it work).
• Preview rendering was completely redesigned and is now authentic, which also fixed some inconsistencies (font fallback etc).
• Default font character is now being properly rendered for the price it cannot be selected anymore. The TFConvert.exe uses unrotated glyph and sometimes a different one (no idea why), always check the preview.
• TFConvert.exe was, is and will be crashing. This problem is not on my side and must be fixed in the TFConvert.exe. What I have done to try to eliminate some of the crashes:
  • Font Script is no longer specified by default.
  • Reported text metrics now match the measurements of TFConvert.exe.
  • Text metrics are no longer required to be passed to the TFConvert.exe, and they aren't by default.
  • Sometimes the TFConvert.exe just hangs. A 5 second timeout was introduced (thanks to Lukáš Václav for the idea), with an opportunity to kill the process.
  • Unnecessary calls to the TFConvert.exe were removed.
  • On Windows Vista and later, the crash reporting of TFConvert.exe is temporarily disabled while the tool is running.
• The tool is brought to the foreground if the TFConvert.exe crashes, so you can see it is still running. Also the window frame was changed to a standard, thick one.
• You won't believe it but in very rare cases the TFConvert.exe is able to generate invalid font files, which likely used to crash both the tool and TinyCLR. The tool now detects and withstands such results.
• Possible dead-lock between the tool and TFConvert.exe was eliminated in the Release build. There is no longer any known situation the tool could hang in (hope you are not using tapes :-)).
• To complete the 120 to 96 DPI migration, the window was resized and adjusted so that it fits into 1024×768 resolution on first run. (Smaller resolutions are still supported with the help of scroll bars).
• The tool is using temporary files and it crashed if it hadn't had rights to create, open or delete them after use, which has been now fixed.
• The requested definition script and generated font files are being added to the crash report (if available), for the case the tool crashes. (I don't know about any scenario in which the tool would crash, let me know if you find some.)
• The application is now digitally signed, and has a strong name so that you can reference it in your projects.

Update 7/30/2008: 1.1.0.0

• Allows you to generate multiple bits per pixel fonts, but can't show them in the preview yet.
• Fixed bug of not passing QA and PF settings to the definition file.
• UI changed to match 96dpi and remembers last window size and position.

This tool could save you some time when dealing with TFConvert.exe. It is a graphical user interface for this font creating tool:

This application requires the .NET Micro Framework SDK to be installed, or at least TFConvert.exe accessible, in order to create .tinyfnt files. Otherwise all it can do is to create the .fontdef definition for you.

The tool is available archived (205 kB, ZIP) or directly (286 kB, EXE). Requires .NET Framework 2.0.

Current biggest limitations:

• Only installed fonts supported (AddFontToProcess not utilized).
• Offsetting the characters is not supported (OffsetX and OffsetY not utilized).
• Entering characters or character ranges using Unicode codes not supported.