: How to determine the "native" size of a bitmapped font? I have a couple of bitmapped fonts in the form of *.dfont files. I would like to find out the "native" size(s) for these fonts.

@Hamaas979

You could try out Fondu, a command-line tool for converting bitmap .dfont files into the BDF format.

If the conversion is successful, these files can be opened with a text editor and they contain metrics information about each glyph. See the linked Wikipedia page for more details.

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@Deb5748823

I don't have any bitmap fonts to try this but if you open the .dfont file in FontForge (https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/downloads/mac/) it should provide info on the pixel size it is.

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@Shelley591

As other's have stated, fonts are bitmaps to begin with. They are vectors. So there is no truly native size.

However, most digital fonts can come with something that is called 'manual hinting'. This means someone went in and made on-screen bitmap copies of each glyph by hand.

So there may be one or more font sizes with this font than will have 'native hinting' for that size.

The catch is that the software has to obey it and there's less of a guarantee today that that will happen. Many operating systems and web browsers can apply their own font smoothing and this is often better (or at least as good) as the old-school hinting files. Some have to apply their own smoothing as they are on high density screens. Of course, as you're probably finding out, a bit-map looking font is something you don't want font smoothing applied to.

If this is a bit-map looking file, then you're probably just best setting it in a few common sizes and see which one looks best. The one that looks best is likely the size(s) that had manual hinting files created. Try 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 24 pt sizes.

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@Sims5801359

I don't think there's really any such thing as a native size in points for a bitmapped font. After all they are comprised of pixels. And even a modern vector font's stated size in points is rather an arbitrary measure.

However, old bitmap Mac system fonts for example assumed 1 point:1 pixel equivalence on screen (72 ppi). So Geneva might have had 9pt, 12pt and 24pt versions. But these are probably better thought of as 9px, 12px and 24px.

Especially as when printing, a higher resolution version could be substituted for the one you specified. So you'd specify 12pt, but the 24pt version would be used to give double the output resolution.

Anyway, going back to the question, you might be able to get a close answer in pixels by counting the number of pixels between ascenders and descenders. Which is not quite the same thing as a font's size. But I think then converting it to points would be an anachronism.

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@Samaraweera207

Modern fonts are usually made up of vector information.More specifically points in space that are connected by lines. They don't have a size. The difference between bitmapped fonts and outline fonts is that the first are composed of several images for each font size. So you have no base font size. A text on a image is not a font, since it cannot be infinitely scaled, and so has a size. My guess is you want to find out the scaling factor with the help of a font editing application. For that you need Fontographer or Glyph or any app with the ability to edit and create fonts. You can read the base size of your outline font from there.

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