ISTR the point of this page had been to keep track of appealling fonts I found for use with Ming/SWFC/whatever, in generating Flash stuff, I can't remember if it was expected to be of public interest, but here you go anyway. Then as time went on the page has sort of expanded in scope a bit.

Using fonts with free SWF generators

Ming can put fonts from fft format into one that can be embedded in flash files. "fft" format can be produced from truetype fonts via ttf2fft utility. I don't know what the situation is with SSWF, if I wind up changing to that. Plenty of other software of course can use the truetype fonts directly, it rather depends what you want to do with them. More of a concern may be what legal restrictions are placed on the font, it certainly is for me as a programmer and webmonkey.

I got a lot of serif things linked via "Beefont" blog.

where I found various fonts from

• Charpentier Renaissance Pro is from Ingofonts. The only free version is "reduced" to be A-Z and a-z, no numbers or whatevers. Unfortunately even then, the Demi one has no lower-case i :P The commercial version is £70, but it is rather beautiful and has a lot of features and characters.
• I think I found something nice at "Sentinel Type" but I forget what. What they list there appears to be commercial stuff.
• I think I got *2* things by Manfred Klein of Typoasis. MKLatinoPlain is one of them, Imperium_Serif was another, but I can't find them at Typoasis.
• Chanticleer Roman was attributed to the "Nick's Fonts" site, but I couldn't find any mention of it there. Then I found that he *had been* part of Typoasis, and his old stuff is still at that site. I found a "Chanticleer" at this page there, but it doesn't call it "Chanticleer Roman". Shall have to compare them side-by-side. Most of what he has there is really nice.
• "Imperator", I got from Paul Lloyd, also of Typoasis. Hmm. Quite significant site maybe?
• I got a few from Apostrophic Labs, who turned out to be (as they weren't actually linked in the blog entries) from.... Typoasis! I got "Amerika", "Mary Jane", and "Futurex" (which they've declared a font family, inviting everybody to contribute their own variants, which people have). Maybe others too?
• "Plumber's Gothic" (!!), was from Harold's Fonts
• "Montezuma's Revenge" was from Disturbed fonts, but they said it shouldn't be redistributed...
• "Rocket Type" aka "Rocket Bitmap" is from Iconian Fonts. Might be awkward for putting in a web-app due to the commercial clause.
• "Koshgarian" and "Kramer" are from David Rakowski from... Typoasis. He seems to be the one responsible for half of the things in Freefont, interestingly. I wonder if this stuff is actually free to use, or what?

I still haven't accounted for:

• Bridgenorth(?) was another Paul Lloyd one.
• Cheboygan (from "PrimaFont" apparently; no link given)
• Lousitania (from "No Images Fonts" apparently, no link given)
• Midnight Kernboy is by Sentinel Type, linked above.
• Mph_2B_Damase(?!) (from Mark Williamson, no link given)

I should check through those old blog entries to see if I can find them again.
At this rate it seems likely some of them will be from yet more people from Typoasis

There's also some nice bitmap fonts from Bitmap Mania, but the site is down ATM. Hopefully it will come back later. ... Ah yes, it is now, checking again a couple months later. Unfortunately it seems it's all in Japanese!! But some very nice stuff there yes.

Old PSF (VGA text-console) fonts

Back in the day, when I used Slackware Linux (since 2000 I use Debian Linux instead), I had a console font I loved called "Scrawl". After I changed over, I found that I couldn't find the old Scrawl font nay more, perhaps there were copyright issues or something. But I managed to find a copy in old versions of Slackware. But it's in DOS raw console font format (similar to PSF format insofaras it's meant for DOS command line interface (or Linux console, which uses the same interface normally). You can't use this normally for other stuff, eg in X11, and there wasn't that much software to work with it.

I then found this neat package: PSF Tools. It lets you convert between PSF-like fonts and other formats. OOH! It can convert to Wyse-60 "soft fonts"? Would those work on my Wyse-120 terminal? ... (it sounds like they MIGHT, if I can find how to install the things...) - See this doc on the Wyse 60 font installation, and this Wyse 120 product page and this Wyse 120 spec page both seem to indicate it supports programmable or "soft" fonts... This page is a bit confusing about whether it'd be compatible or not, but it does say it's incomplete.

DONE!

Ok it seems that if your Wyse terminal supports these things, all you do is

• Put it into a suitable Wyse compatibility mode, so NOT VT100, which won't work at all! It'll just beep and blank the screen otherwise. Unfortunately I find that when I put it in WY-120 mode, nothing I tell Linux (eg export TERM=wy-120 etc) stops the output getting garbled, so I guess this has to be temporary.
• Take your new WY-60 font file, and just *cat* it, from within the terminal. Watch in awe as all the text on the screen slowly shimmers over to the new font!
• If WY-120 mode causes you trouble too, now change back to VT100 mode or whatever you were using.

But I digress. Apart from being maybe able to install Scrawl on my old Wyse terminal, which was a bit of a bolt from the blue, this may allow you to convert PSFs and other dos fonts to BDF, or to Postscript or Truetype (indirectly, through other formats)! So you could use them in Flash or in X or in documents, etc. Don't be surprised if they look grotty after the conversion, being only 14x8 typically.

"Hershey" vector plotter fonts

I'm not entirely clear whether the name "Hershey" is for the set of fonts or the file format they're in, but there's a Java (meh) app for converting these free fonts to other formats, and some links about the very primitive vector-based file format and the fonts themselves, at http://www.cowlark.com/hershtrans/. They're apparently intended for use in old fashioned pen plotters.

It looks to me as though it'd be very simple to make a convertor anyway, given the spec for another vector format to translate them to. One curious stipulation in the licence for these free fonts, is that you're not allowed to translate the fonts back into their original file format, though you can translate them to others, and presumably can convert other fonts to that format. You should probably read it all for yourself if you want to be sure you understand the details (AH! It seems I got the wrong end of the stick: I think the format you can't convert them back into is another one entirely, quite obscure, and not the one they're freely distributed in).Other than that, they're very very free, and I should probably try them out on my own pen plotter (yes I have one; if you know me or have read much of this site, this should come as no surprise).

other texty things

TxtBdf2Ps can convert text files to Postscript documents, using a given BDF font (Which it embeds in the file). Nice quick-and-dirty alternative to things like TeX or Basser Lout.

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