Request to update a source file in ImageTool

[Kostov]

Hey. I just wanted to report that one of the source files in imagetool.zip, a tool for editing fonts in the GZDoom format (more info here), is outdated. It has incorrect shadow alignments and a misaligned letter (Ÿ) that have long been fixed in the official GZDoom releases but remain in imagetool.zip to this day. I just spent some time fixing these problems myself, ready to submit a pull request, before I discovered that I was working with an outdated source file.

I’d like to ask whoever manages the ImageTool download (I’m guessing Graf Zahl?) to update the file named confont.pcx with this one right here, which is a decompiled version of the confont.lmp file in the current GZDoom releases.

[Graf Zahl]

This is actually long abandoned. Nobody is managing anything here. I thought that Slade offered editing support for these things so these old tools are of low interest.

[Gez]

SLADE does not feature a font editor at the moment; just a simple font viewer.

[Kostov]

This is actually long abandoned. Nobody is managing anything here. I thought that Slade offered editing support for these things so these old tools are of low interest.

SLADE does not feature a font editor at the moment; just a simple font viewer.

Exactly. Besides DoomCrap (which contains extra features that I don’t use), ImageTool is the only application I know of that can edit and convert BIGFONT files.

[Kostov]

Since GZDoom is undergoing major development in the localization and font department, this might as well be closed. ImageTool will be history.

[Enjay]

So, are the old compiled fonts going? I've just written a post as to why I like working with them.

I'm not saying that imagetool doesn't need an update (it does) and I can also understand Graf's (or anyone else's) lack of enthusiasm for doing anything with it but, to me, the idea of everything being on a single source image and conveniently compiled into a single lump is much neater than working with loads of little image files.

[Graf Zahl]

Don't get your hopes up. The problems with these compiled fonts run a lot deeper than just the binary format. If the code to deal with them was in any way easy to work with, things might look better but seemingly everything that concerns these fonts is in such a dismal state that I don't want to bother:

The converter in Imagetool is nearly incomprehensible - it is full of old-school-ish "optimizations" that not only make it hard to read and hard to work with, but also make the decoding part in the engine needlessly messy.

Of course several fields in there are too short, making it problematic to add international support to it, and so on, and so on.
For me the easiest solution is to just deprecate the whole thing and implement something *I* have less trouble working with - and that's the single glyphs.

In short: What is there is there to stay but don't bother asking for feature extensions. They won't happen.

[Enjay]

Sorry if I inadvertently scaremongered (more in the other thread than this I guess). I would not expect support for FON2 to be removed. There are a lot of mods out there that use them and I can't see anyone wanting to break that.

To be fair, it's not the fact that FON2 is compiled that appeals to me, more that the source is a single image, and that it means a single lump in the WAD versus dozens (plus a control lump). All those individual glyphs are just messy IMO. If there was some way for GZDoom to work with a source image directly (i.e. no need to compile) that would be great. No idea how feasible that is though.

[Graf Zahl]

The main problem is that the source for these fonts is only fine for plain ASCII. The larger the character set grows the more messy it gets - and with something like Cyrillic which lies in the 0x4xx range (i.e. roughly 900 code points after ASCII) it becomes impossible to manage.