C# - Create font from image or set of images

The title really says it all. I need help in creating a custom font from either a set of separate image files or from one image with a series of characters setup in a grid fashion in C#. I have searched everywher开发者_开发问答e and haven't found any useful resources on the subject. If you have any advice, thanks in advance.

As far as I have read, there is nothing within the C# framework that allows for the creation of a font, by the looks of it you will have to implement this on your own. Microsoft of course puts out some tools and a SDK for font creation, here along with other information here There are several tools outside of Microsoft that will allow you to create fonts aswell, for example this. I'm sure this isn't quite what you are looking for but it's a start.

This was something that was done 20 years ago, before freely scalable outline font technologies like TrueType became available. Some of these fonts are still on your machine, the .fon files in c:\windows\fonts. They actually contain bitmaps of the letters in the font, usually around 256 of them for each individual font height supported by the font.

Support for these fonts is not present in .NET so don't consider creating one of them. In general, the disadvantages of not using a TrueType font are:

• only available in certain point sizes
• no decent Unicode support
• different code pages require different fonts
• no support for kerning and glyph overhang
• no anti-aliasing support
• no ClearType support

Tools are available to create your own TrueType font. It is not exactly easy to get right, one of the things that makes TrueType shine is 'hinting', altering the letter shapes when they font is rendered at small point sizes so that they are still legible. Verdana is a exemplary font that is hinted extraordinarily well.

Anyhoo, to pursue your approach you'll need to create a bitmap that contains all the letters that you are willing to support, arranged horizontally for example. The best way to order them is to pick the letters in a code page that's close to you, like Windows 1252 which is common in Western Europa and the Americas.

Things are simple if the font is fixed-pitched, every letter will start at a multiple of the letter width. A proportionally spaced font requires a separate lookup table that specifies at what pixel offset each letter starts. Using System.Drawing for example, you'd use the Graphics.DrawImage(image, rectangle, rectangle, graphicsunit) overload where you setup the rectangles so that the letter you want to render is copied. Use Encoding.GetBytes() to convert the string to render to indices in your font bitmap.