Making Console Font/BigFont/SmallFont

[Cacodoomonic]

This has been a massive nuisance to me for years. I have made custom fonts in PNG format but have never been able to turn them into working LUMPS as bigfonts or smallfonts or consolefonts. I have tried using Spideys front generator and imagetool and so on. Nothing works for me. How can I quite simply convert my PNG font sheet into a working lump? This is really getting on my nerves now and I have no idea why it's so difficult to actually get this working. If you visit realm 667, there are downloadable fonts on there made by the community. So what the Hell are they doing that I'm not? Why can I not figure this garbage out and why everytime I search for an answer I get absolutely nothing helpful back?

[Tango]

I have been meaning to better document the process somehow after the last few times I have messed with this stuff. if I remember to later and someone else doesn’t beat me to the punch, I should really properly document it.

 

but in the meantime, tl;dr off the top of my head

• encase each character of the font in one color, and lay them out in the proper order
• save as a pcx, making sure the bg color is a specific index and the outline color is another specific index. one should be index 0 and the other 255 I think, but I don’t remember which
• run whatever the appropriate command is with imagetool on the pcx file
• if it errors out somehow, double check the color indices are correct, and make sure there is plenty of empty background buffer space to the right of the rightmost edge of the font grid, and same for below. if the right edge of the image is precisely at the right edge of a character border, I think that will cause an error