Either format, mine or the Linux PSF formats, each have an advantage and disadvantage.
Mine has the advantage of specifying a width for each character. For example, when using a fixed width font, there is a lot of space wasted between two characters when the i character is used. For example, look at the word "fixed". If this was a fixed font, there would be a bit of space before and after the i character. The disadvantage, this function adds meta-data to the font file, as well as each bitmap stream starts at a different byte-boundary.
The
PSF format(s) have the advantage that each bitmap stream starts at a 'width' boundary, easily and quickly calculated. It also only has a four- or 32-byte header, nothing more as far as meta-data. The disadvantage, there is a lot of space between the 'i' character and other characters. Same for other characters, like ! ( ) | etc. It also wastes space in the file. For example, a 9-bit width character will waste 7 bits per horizontal line per character. A 9x16 character font, with 256 characters, will waste 28,672 bits (3,584 bytes) in the file. Nothing really, especially if the file system already allocated 4096 bytes, but still, waste is waste.
I recently updated the
FontEdit app to allow loading and saving of PSF fonts as well. You can load a PSF font and save it as my font format, visa-vesa, or simply back as a PSF font. It is for Windows only, but
source code is available. I haven't tried, but I am curious if it can be compiled on a *nix machine using
Wine or something like that, or simply by re-coding it for *nix. If someone does, I would be more than happy to include the source on my page(s).
Ben