Trick: Obtaining high-quality bitmap glyphs in Fontographer 5

Fontographer 5 for Mac can include bitmap glyphs in a Type 1 or TrueType suitcase. It can also export them into a BDF bitmap font which you can further edit with a bitmap font editor such as FontLab BitFonter. In Fontographer 5, there are three ways to generate bitmap glyphs from font outlines, which will produce different results. If you're interested in high-quality bitmap glyphs, you should explore all three possibilities to determine which one gives you the most satisfactory results.

Depending on the way you generate the bitmap glyphs, different rasterizers will be used:

1. If you generate the bitmaps inside Fontographer (using Element / Bitmap Info or Window / Open Bitmap Window), the bitmap glyphs will be generated using the classic Fontographer rasterizer and stored inside your Fontographer document (database, .fog file). This rasterizer will produce similar results as older versions of Fontographer. Especially in small sizes, the results may not be very satisfactory.

2. If you don't have any bitmaps stored in your Fontographer document, and you generate a Mac Type 1 Suitcase font, the bitmap glyphs will be generated using a built-in version of the Adobe Type 1 rasterizer. This rasterizer will process the Type 1 hints specified in your font, and the result will be similar to the screen appearance of the Type 1 font if it were installed in Microsoft Windows and displayed with font smoothing disabled. To do this, choose File / Generate Font Files, switch to Advanced mode, choose Mac OS X and 9 as platform and Mac Type 1 Suitcase as format. Then, specify the Bitmap Sizes to Create and generate the suitcase. Typically, bitmaps generated this way will be of higher quality than those generated inside Fontographer.

3. If you don't have any bitmaps stored in your Fontographer document, and you generate a Mac TrueType Suitcase font, the bitmap glyphs will be generated using a built-in version of the Microsoft TrueType rasterizer. The Type 1 hints specified in your font will be converted into TrueType hinting using the high-quality FontLab hint conversion algorithm, and bitmaps will be generated from the hinted TrueType outlines. The result will be similar to the screen appearance of the TrueType font if it were installed in Microsoft Windows and displayed with font smoothing disabled. To do this, choose File / Generate Font Files, switch to Advanced mode, choose Mac OS X and 9 as platform and Mac TrueType Suitcase as format. Then, specify the Bitmap Sizes to Create and generate the suitcase. Typically, bitmaps generated this way will also be of higher quality than those generated inside Fontographer, but will be different than those generated using the Adobe Type 1 rasterizer.

The methods 2 and 3 will produce high-quality bitmaps, but they will only generate bitmaps for the 256 encoded characters, not to the entire character repertoire.

If you generated your bitmaps using the Adobe Type 1 rasterizer or the Microsoft TrueType rasterizer (i.e. method 2 or 3 described above), the bitmaps are not stored inside your Fontographer document yet, but you can now import the generated bitmaps back into Fontographer. To do this, choose File / Import / Bitmaps, pick the Mac Suitcase you just generated (a Type 1 or a TrueType suitcase), and then Select All bitmap sizes to import. The bitmap glyphs will be imported into your Fontographer document. You can edit them using Window / Open Bitmap Window, or you can export them into the BDF format using File / Export / BDF.