THE MYSTERIES OF THE FONT EXPLAINED

[Marrub]

A lot of people, and I mean a lot of people have trouble with making fonts for ZDoom. Time to fix that!

THE TOOLS
First you need the means to do the deeds.
ImageTool. If you've had troubles with this thing before, don't worry. Just follow along.
Bagheadspidey's DoomCrap
A brain, hands, and a spine. Skeleton optional.

CONFONTS
Open up the font generator from DoomCrap by running the batch file named "Font Generator.bat".
Select Console Font from the Mode dropdown menu. It should be selected by default.
Select your font of choice. For this example I'll be using a beautiful selection of Comic Sans MS Bold Italic 10pt. Yes.
Change the brightness accordingly to your preference. You may have to tweak the positioning and cell size for it to look proper. I chose -2, -2, 0, -2 respectively.
Now, go to File>Save Image As and save to your ImageTool directory. It should use the PCX format (NOT THE FOLDER OF PCX FORMAT THIS WILL KILL YOU AND MAKE MY FACE EXPLODE INTO SHOTGUNS)

Get command line open (On Windows Vista and up you can do Windows Key+R and then type cmd in the run box then press enter) and change your directory to ImageTool's.
For me this would be the following commands:

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cd desktop
cd utils
cd imagetool

Now, toss this command at it.

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imagetool confont yourfile.pcx confont.fon

This should generate a confont for you from the PCX file you created earlier, just change yourfile to the file you saved. It's now ready for usage ingame!

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BIGFONTS
Almost the same method as confonts.
Get the font generator back open, and this time choose Big Font from the Mode dropdown menu.
Choose the brightness, position etc just as before. Save just as before.
Now, there's a problem with the way the file is saved from the font generator. The palette isn't indexed correctly.
You have to open the PCX file in GIMP and change the index from Colors>Map>Rearrange Colormap.
Drag the red color (should be index 1) and drag it ALL the way to the end.
Export the image. Toss this command through command line:

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imagetool font yourfile.pcx bigfont.fon

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Please yell at me if this doesn't work. It Worked For Me™.

[Enjay]

The only thing I would say is that I have never been able to get Baghead Spidey's font genertator to produces fonts (particularly bigfont or smallfont) as good looking as hand-pixelled font images. This is not really a criticism of the program. It's more a recognition that Windows/system fonts are not as well suited to the job as something specifically designed for the game.

[Nash]

^ my problems exactly. The forced anti-aliased graphics produced don't work particularly too well with Doom.

[Gez]

Vector fonts are meant to be monochromatic -- a black shape on a white background, or whatever other color combination. Doom's font rendering, however, expects pictures. Each letter is not just a shape, but a complex graphic, with a texture. There are varying colors, shades aren't used just to antialiase the outline but to give volume and texture to the characters.

That's why this "OPTIONS" in the second example looks so bad. It has no outlines and look rather blurry. It might look good if it was in a contrasting color on a flat background, but it's not, so it just looks blurry.

The font generator tool can still be used, though, if only to get a starting point. But then you'd better load it up in paint.net/Gimp/Photoshop and start pixel-pushing until it looks like a proper bitmap font.

[Marrub]

You can edit the PCX files in GIMP or any other editor that doesn't ignore palette organization to your liking. This is just explaining how to make simple fonts.

[Enjay]

This is just explaining how to make simple fonts.

Understood, and the tutorial is appreciated.