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- I recently got involved in making Flash media. One of the problems people often have is fonts not aliasing properly, and one solution somebody gave is to use bitmapped fonts (somehow). The poster provided a few links to sites that had dozens of bitmapped fonts.
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- So just out of curosity, I download a bitmapped font off a site and attempt to use it for…something. And then I found that almost all of the software I have apparently doesn’t support bitmapped fonts at all: Photoshop seems to be the only one that does. MS Word, StarOffice 5, OpenOffice 1.0, Illustrator 10, Paint Shop Pro 7, InDesign 2 and LiveMotion 2 don’t even list bitmapped fonts in the font lists. Fontographer can export bitmapped fonts, but doesn’t seem to be able to open an existing one. What are they used for anymore?
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Wow, does that make me feel old.
As far as I can tell, they aren’t really used anymore. Windows’ support for bitmap fonts has withered away like a cave fish’s eyes. It’s a shame, because making TrueType fonts is much more difficult, and programmatically generating them is a nightmare.
When I worked in the translation biz, we used them sometimes for situations where we needed to have something desktop published by our poor outside contractor, who couldn’t possibly keep fonts for all the wacky Asian languages in which we handled translations. I don’t know how much things have developed since then (this was in 1995), but we used to have the translator save stuff in some format that the desktop publisher could handle without having install separate operating systems for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. IIRC he dealt with the situation in some convoluted way by using bitmapped fonts.
Ah, the joys of working with several dozen freelancers, each with his/her own favorite (and usually outdated) word processing software…I get a headache just thinking about it!
A little bit of a straying from the original topic but it has been my experience in the world of web media that it is often easier to create graphics when dealing with nonstandard fonts. It could be a little time consuming but use Photoshop or your own preferred flavor of bitmap graphics editor and create a small file (gif, jpg, whatever though i prefer transparent gif) for each letter/character in that font you plan on using then import those images to you flash file’s library. The only drawback to this is that if you are using anything other than “plain” characters,IOW, using text that has been run through BladePro or some other set of filters to make it “pretty” it will create a LOT of objects for your CPU to keep track of when you “break-apart” the file for any kind of complex tweening. As with all htings on the internet, flash included, KISS is still the best rule to follow.
You always assume that a visitor to the site is using an old browser with no plugins, basic font packs, and that they have no clue what they are doing - so graphics turn out to be the best way to do most complicated non-standard fonts.
Sadly enough, printer companies tend(ed) to govern font protocols, making life miserable for everyone else. More recently, you’ve been able to “embed” fonts into webpages (much like CSS). And I’d use PNG instead of GIF. GIF is outdated and very restricted, and while PNG is larger, it is good for simple images that need transparency and detail (like text) as well as more detailed images with high color counts.
As for foreign languages, Windows TrueType fonts come character sets for foreign languages for each font, making it a moot point. There is a reason bitmapped fonts vanished. 
Sight hijack:
This is the first I’ve heard of PNG being used in a web context. I will readily admit to the many faults of the GIF…the only time I ever use it is for animation (when flash would be too ungainly) and for those occassions when I need a graphic that will blend seamlessly with my background (without needing to go through a slew (sp?) of graphical gyumnastics whenever I need to do a background change). Is PNG a universally accepted format now? I have had problems in the past with one browser “liking” formats that others didnt. IE liking .bmp while Netscape didn’t as an example. When I program I tend to prgram for the “little guy” who is avoiding MSIE and may be using Netscape or Opera (great pgram BTW). For direct flash integration it would be great and I’ll have to be sure to remember it…but how compatible is it browser-side?
I have a word processor on my PDA which was originally written in Japanese. It uses bitmapped fonts for writing Japanese characters, known as kanji.
.PNG is, thankfully, a fully supported format. The animated version (typically .MNG, last I checked) still isn’t natively fully supported by most browsers, but there are plugins available for it (not that anyone actually uses .MNG with Flash around and a distinct lack of programs supporting .MNG creation).
Everything you ever wanted to or possibly could know about PNG/MNG:
Personally for web design, I love PNG. It is still a little big for some applications, where JPEG’s smaller size outshines it (image thumbnails, banners, etc). For some applications. PNG can actually be smaller than JPG, depending on JPG’s compression. So in short, it is specialized, but JPG is still standard. For now.