Xymantix Online

QCD Font Maker

After spending more than an hour one day making a charset.bmp file for a QCD playlist, I had an epiphany - why not write a program to automate the creation of font files! With that thought still fresh in my mind, I sat down at the computer and whipped up a program that does exactly that. It allows you to select a font on your system, then specify various factors such as font size, anti-aliasing, strength, boldness, and italics. From there it shows you a sample of the font using customizable text, a preview of the resultant QCD font.bmp file, and a 4x zoomed version of the font.bmp file. You can tweak it by offsetting the text vertically, specifying +/- pixel spacing between characters, and even forcing fixed-width numbers in a proportional font. When you've got something that you like, save it out and try it in a QCD skin.

Here's a screenshot of the program:

Overall, the quality of the resultant font.bmp files far exceeded my expectations. I figured that they would be pretty good, but that the spacing would be off and I'd have to do a lot of tweaking in PhotoShop. Luckily that's not the case. Of the fonts I tested, most were perfect, and a couple needed a pixel or two of tweaking - especially around letters like 'j' where the descender can overlap the previous character. The program has options to add an extra space in front of the troublesome characters like 'j' and '/', so that's not that much of an issue anymore.

To showcase it, I created several fonts for QCD in just a couple of minutes. Here's an animated screenshot showing off some of the new ones that I made:

Goto Download Page