Some Suggestions for Forthcomming Release

[Simon]

Here are a few suggestions that I think would be nice to incorporate in any future release.

Save! There really needs to be a save as this can be a very time consuming process and if you need to go back and make a minor change when you’ve closed the program you can’t and have to start from scratch.

Working with large fonts is not easy and with very large fonts it is not possible. Above a character height of 35 or so the display grid is so dense that it is difficult to pick an individual pixel.

When working with large fonts the dead space around the character becomes quite large and it is difficult to know where the boundary of the area that you will eventually export is, the majority of the area shown is redundant in any case and effectively makes the working area even smaller.

I would suggest that the export area could be set in the main window and this is what is actually shown in the display. This would be so much better, you would know what you were going to export and could see if you were cutting something off and where the boundaries were plus the pixel grid would be much less dense and easy to see not showing the unused area.

When exporting the method of selecting the first character and then the numbers of characters after means that you need to count the number of characters. Specifying the first and last character would I think be a better technique.

With all fonts there seems to be a lot of space around the characters, I understand that this is something to do with the windows fonts but could a bit of the space be automatically removed? Also when you shift a character up it would be nice to have the option to do this for all the characters but it is only possible to select one character at a time. I find myself going through characters 32 to 127 shifting the whole lot up by the same amount one at a time.

When selecting pixels would it be possible to hold the mouse key down to change a group of pixels, dragging the mouse pointer changes every pixel you drag it over?

[ESPsupport]

Thanks for your suggestions, they are appreciated.

Save is in the next version.

I will investigate making editing of large fonts easier.

The trouble with 'redundant area' / 'dead space' is that it's redundant to you, you know what you are going to use and what you aren't. If you look at a font, no matter how large you will see that some characters almost touch each boundary, more commonly in the characters above 0x80, but even characters in the 'standard' end of the world have quirks from font to font, check out "#@(){}[]|_ in your favourite font. Many of the 'running' fonts have almost no dead space at all.

Of course, once you have done a save with your desired 'subset' it might be more feasible to move the characters automatically

When exporting the method of selecting the first character and then the numbers of characters after means that you need to count the number of characters. Specifying the first and last character would I think be a better technique.



For a computer it's easier the way it is now Hmm, better try and do something about that.



When selecting pixels would it be possible to hold the mouse key down to change a group of pixels, dragging the mouse pointer changes every pixel you drag it over?

Could you desribe that a bit more? atm the mouse moves freely with no button pressed, with the left button down it draws and the right button it erases, seems fine to me

[Simon]

Large fonts - I realise that automating this is not an easy task due to the few exceptions that there always are but there must be an easier way than going through 100 characters and shifting them up individually. Would it not be possible to select multiple characters with the shift key and move them all up?

To help with larger fonts would it be possible to at least show the width of the character with a different colour on the grid line at the character width. For example if you are working on a 40x30 font the capital A has a width of 20 so the vertical line at 20 width would be green.

Could the grid/character area be made larger by being able to re-size it or the whole window.

Selecting pixels as you describe was exactly what I had in mind but that doesn’t work for me. I can only change a pixel at a time by left clicking, if I drag the pointer with the either button down nothing changes.

[ESPsupport]

Selecting pixels as you describe was exactly what I had in mind but that doesn’t work for me. I can only change a pixel at a time by left clicking, if I drag the pointer with the either button down nothing changes.

Oops, I think I might be describing something that's changed post the version that is generally available.

[ESPsupport]

Could the grid/character area be made larger by being able to re-size it or the whole window

If you have maximised font tool the next time you change the fonts size it does resize the grid, if it needs to be resized. It doesn't always fill the window though, it's all to do with a) keeping the aspect ratio and b) having width and/or height pixels available to make it one 'step' bigger