Refont

By Geep, 2024, and similar to the article about Q3Font.

As of 2024, the new "refont" command-line utility allows inspection and alteration of font metrics. It is designed to be an easier-to-use version of the inspection/alteration parts of Q3Font. It also provides a font analysis feature.

Comparison with Font Patcher

Refont can be seen as complementary to Font Patcher. The latter has additional features that may be better if planning a wholesale rearrangement or expansion of characters within a bitmap. But Font Patcher requires installation of Perl, while refont.exe is more drop and go.

Comparison with Q3Font

For metric alteration, q3font has a native "*.fnt" human-readable format, and supports DAT <==> FNT conversions. For compatability, so does refont.

Advantages of Q3Font

• This has been an important traditional tool for Doom3/TDM font manipulation.
• In addition to production/consumption of FNT, it -
  • Allows creation of DAT & TGA files from a TrueType font (although for this purpose, ExportFontToDoom3 has been preferred in practice).
  • Can write (but not read) an alternative "compact report".

Advantages of Refont

• It's open-source, so further C++ development is possible.
• It has its own native human-readable format, "*.ref", similar to .fnt but better.

The better features of REF are:

• Codepoints are enumerated in not just decimal, but also hex.
• Coordinates of the overall image box within its bitmap are expressed in pixel units, rather than [0...1] fractional floating point. So the user is spared having to manually do this tedious and error-prone calculation.
• if optionally provided, a separate, read-only annotation file will automatically decorate the .ref file with helpful information as the file is generated. This is explained below.

Because the code is open-source, there's better clarity about -

• how parsing and calculations are done.
• what warnings are emitted.

Also, using "-stats", refont can write (but not read) an analysis of a DAT file, particularly looking for problematic/unimplemented Western-language characters.

For Inspection & Correction of DAT files

To Get the Data in Readable, Editable Form

For viewing and altering in a text editor, two formats are provided. Both list every codepoint, in order from 0 to 255, as a block of data. Within each block, every item gets its own line.

As a FNT File

To create a q3font-compatable "<dat-name>.fnt" file:

refont -decompile <path to given .dat file> -fnt

where the path can be a full path, a relative path (e.g., starting with "./" or "../"), or just the file name in the current working directory. The resulting .fnt file will appear in the same directory. It have the same name as the .dat file, except for the extension. As a convenience to keep track of versions, it is not required that the file name be in the standard fontImage_nn.dat form.

Example code block for the letter A:

	...
	char 65
	{
		height 18
		top 18
		bottom 0
		pitch 3
		xSkip 18
		imageWidth 20
		imageHeight 18
		s 0.769531
		t 0.250000
		s2 0.847656
		t2 0.320313
		glyph 0
		shaderName fonts/stone_0_24.tga
	}
 	...

As a REF File

To create a refont-specific "<dat-name>.ref" file:

refont -decompile <path to given .dat file>

The same path and naming conventions as for .fnt generation discussed above apply here.

Example code block for the letter A when no supplemental annotation file is present:

	...
	char 65 (0x41)
	{
		height 18
		top 18
		bottom 0
		pitch 3
		xSkip 18
		imageWidth 20
		imageHeight 18
		coord_s 197
		coord_t 64
		coord_s2 217
		coord_t2 82
		glyph 0
		shaderName fonts/stone_0_24.tga
	}
	...

Items bolded differ from FNT format. The starting line expresses the value in hex. And rather than s, t, s2, t2 in fractional [0...1] floating point, the "coord_..." values are expressed (and editable) in pixel units.

When Editing

Refont has a minimal parser. To keep it happy, preserve the file's line structure. In particular:

• every REF and FNT file has the same number of lines.
• all keywords within a block must be present, and in a particular order.
• each block must have exactly the same number of lines (except for the special one at the end).

The meaning of the font metrics are explained elsewhere (LINKS COMING SOON). The Q3Font article has an example of simple metric editing that is also pertinent to refont.

To Move Changed FNT or REF Data Back to a DAT

q3font -compile <path to given .fnt or .ref file>

This reverses the -decompile process, to create a .dat file whose name is derived from the .fnt or .ref file. Importantly, this decompile/compile cycle leaves .tga/.dds files untouched.

The Annotation File

When told to generate a REF file (but not FNT), refont.exe also looks for a file called "refont_char_annotations.txt", in the same folder as refont.exe. That file should have exactly 256 data lines in it, one for each of the codepoints, in order. As the REF is generated, the line that starts a codepoint's data block gets the corresponding annotation line appended to it.

This is clearer with an example, here using a provided sample "refont_char_annotations.txt" specific to TDM's codepage. In that annotation file, the line for letter 'A' has this:

0x41 is A

(It is not required that hex "41", or any particular text, be present. It just makes it easier to author an annotation file if the lines are numbered. The presentation of the choice of character glyph, "A" in this example, is left to the annotation file. This allows refont to be used with other idTech3/4 games that don't necessarily used the TDM-specific codepoints.)

Then the block in a generated REF file would have that string appended, but with " // " inserted.

	...
	char 65 (0x41) // 0x41 is A
	{
		height 18
		top 18
		bottom 0
		pitch 3
		xSkip 18
		imageWidth 20
		imageHeight 18
		coord_s 197
		coord_t 64
		coord_s2 217
		coord_t2 82
		glyph 0
		shaderName fonts/stone_0_24.tga
	}
	...

Here are a few more interesting examples from that REF:

	...
	char 5 (0x05) // 0x05 is a control character, unusable in TDM
	...
	char 166 (0xa6) // 0xA6 is Š (not ISO 8859-1 ¦) (from A9 in ISO 8859-2) (TDM only)
	...

As you see, the provided annotations are fairly minimal, as for "A" here, when the TDM codepoint matches that of ASCII, ISO-8852-1 ("Latin-1"), or Windows-1252 ("Western Europe"). But has more info otherwise.

Annotations - these or the ones discussed next - live only in a REF file, and are not retained when converted to a DAT file.

Revising or Making Your Own Annotations File

If creating your own refont_char_annotations.txt file, note that encoding upper-range characters in UTF-8 will be more universal than using Windows region-specific codepages. To enter a UTF-8 character using its four digit hex Unicode (say, in a range of interest 0x0080-0x00FF):

• Under Windows, type the four hex digits followed by Alt-X.
• Under Linux, hold down Ctrl+Shift, type U followed by the 4 digits; release Ctrl+Shift.

When refont reads refont_char_annotations.txt, any line that starts with ";" will be ignored. The latter is so that you can put comments into the file, that will not propagate to the generated REF file.

Other than that, be sure to have exactly 256 lines of annotations. A line can be empty, i.e., have only the linebreak.

When generating a REF file, refont will automatically add " // " before each non-empty annotation, so don't include that.

Adding Your Own Annotations to a REF File

Beyond the refont_char_annotation.txt content, you can add certain commentary to the REF file without it affecting its ability to convert to a DAT file. Here are the rules:

• Don't add or subtract lines, or comment out non-blank lines
• Feel free to append a comment to the end of a line, by beginning the comment with " //".
• Likewise, on a line starting with "char" that had an annotation automatically added, you can revise the annotation as you see fit.

Example with revision in bold:

	...
	char 65 (0x41) // Capital A was slightly clipped. Decremented s, s2 by 1. Looks OK now.
	{
		height 18
		top 18
		bottom 0
		pitch 3
		xSkip 18
		imageWidth 20
		imageHeight 18
		coord_s 196 // WAS: 197
		coord_t 64
		coord_s2 216 // WAS: 217
		coord_t2 82
		glyph 0
		shaderName fonts/stone_0_24.tga
 	}
	...

In this way, you can markup a REF file as a record of work to do, work in progress, or work completed.

Errors and Warning

During the compile or decompile, errors and warnings may be generated in the console. Fatal errors are largely due to:

• file i/o problems
• deviations from the strict DAT, REF, and FNT formats.

Warnings, which are not fatal, at this time are largely due to anomolous numeric values. The TDM engine can tolerant some of these, so they don't necessarily need fixing. The warnings could in theory be further improved in the future; see comments in the source code for ideas.

For Statistics on Unimplemented or Problematic Font Characters

DAT file analysis here is primarily designed to benefit english/european fonts. It will use the optional annotation file if provided. Syntax:

    refont -stats <path to given .dat file>

Use "-stats" by itself, not combined with "-decompile".

The resulting analysis report will have the same name and location as the DAT file, but with a ".txt" suffix. The report provides categorized totals and (for problematic characters) itemizations across all 256 character codepoints. The counts of problems should be considered minimums, since no inspection of bitmap files (TGA or DSS) is done. But a perhaps surprising amount of insight can be gleaned just from DAT file metrics. Itemizations include annotations from the 'ref_char_annotation' file, if provided.

In the hunt for missing characters, 3 signatures are important:

• Presumed 'Hollow Box' = glyph's 'shadername' is <fontname>_0_<size>.dds only, and s & t are zero, but not s2 & t2
• '<Space>' = same test as 'Hollow Box', but pointed to by char 32 (0x20)
• 'Zero Box' = No glyph box (s, t, s2, t2 all zero)

A given analysis will assume either 'Hollow Box' or '<Space>' but not both.

The analysis provides totals and itemizations - grouped into lower (0-127) and upper ranges (128-255) - in 3 passes:

• Pass 1 - Handling of unprintable/unsupported/missing codepoints, indicated by Hollow Box, Zero Box, or <Space>. Some of these are not a problem, but some are tagged as "Undesirable".
• Pass 2 - Bad glyph box (negative s, t, s2, or t2; or s2 <= s, t2 <= t) or good glyph box with dubious metrics (imageHeight <= 0, imageWidth <=0, imageHeight != height). Excludes those already counted as "Undesirable" in Pass 1.
• Pass 3 - Detection of duplicate glyph boxes (other than Hollow Box, Zero Box, or <Space>). Detected by: glyph's values for shadername, s, t, s2, & t2 exactly match those of another codepoint. These are grouped into "Dup Sets".

Finally, across all passes, a count if given of the minimum "Total Glyphs Needing Work".

Downloads

Release 2 of April 7, 2024:

• refont.exe
• sample annotation file for English/European, recommended
• sample annotation for Russian, recommended. To use, edit filename to remove "[russian]" substring.
• source code: refont.cpp