Amiga Bitmap Font Tools

Introduction

A set of tools to read and parse bitmap font files as used by the Commodore Amiga.

Quick start

If you're just here to convert some Amiga files into ttf or otf fonts for use in your applications, then hello and welcome! The Python script will do the job for you. Head on over to the /python folder and follow the instructions there.

What are bitmap fonts?

Chances are you’re reading these words on a device with nice, crisp text. The typeface you’re looking at now is drawn from mathematical lines and curves, which means it can be scaled up and down to look good at large and small sizes. It wasn’t always this way.

Early home computers such as the ZX Spectrum rendered text as a series of dots, or pixels, typically arranged in a monospaced 8×8 grid. Then came next generation home computers such as the Commodore Amiga. Text on the Amiga took a step forward in that fonts were no longer limited to the 8×8 box. Glyphs could be larger and have proportional widths – it was possible to create bitmap fonts bearing a passing resemblance to proper typefaces found in print!

On the Amiga, a bitmap font, as stored on disk, consists of:

• a .font file (The 'font contents' file)
• a similarly named directory, containing a series of files bearing numeric names ('font descriptor' files)

So for the font Sapphire, there is a file called sapphire.font, and a directory called sapphire containing the files 14 and 19, corresponding to fonts with pixel heights of 14 and 19 respectively.

You can find more details of what's going on here at https://andrewgraham.dev/category/bitmap-fonts/.

What's in all the directories?

Here you'll find:

• in /python, a Python script to convert Amiga native files into other formats (ttf, otf, ufo).
• in /glyphsapp, some scripts and plugins to import Amiga native files and JSON files into the Glyphs font editor.
• in /node, some Node.js scripts to parse font contents and font descriptor files, and output the data in JSON format.

Have a look in each folder for (slightly) more detailed READMEs.

Sample fonts

Webcleaner, a set of fonts originally designed for Amiga web browsers, are available in the fonts/webcleaner directory for your experimentation.

Some other fonts of my own making are available in fonts/native. Some of the glyphs are a bit shabby but in fairness they're thirty years old and I didn't have much access to the internet back then to know what they looked like.

And if you don't want to go through the rigmarole of converting them, many of the fonts have already been converted to .otf format. They are in fonts/converted for you to use.

Have fun!