this is a utility for converting old microsoft windows bitmap fonts into bitmap fonts that can be used with Pillow
this is done using another tool as a dependency, mkwinfont, so be sure to place its two python files in the same directory as this python file
the only other dependency is Pillow itself, which, way back when i wrote this tool, for whatever reason (now lost to the shifting sands of time), i chose to use version 5.1.0 of
example usage:
./dewinfont.py -p DIALOGH DIALOGH.FON # first deconstruct the .FON file into FD files
./mkpilfont.py DIALOGH05.fd # make the 1x version
./mkpilfont.py -s 2 DIALOGH05.fd # make the 2x version
./mkpilfont.py -s 3 DIALOGH05.fd # make the 3x version
./mkpilfont.py -s 4 DIALOGH05.fd # make the 4x version
i really like the default dialog font from the hebrew-enabled and hebrew-localized versions of windows 98 second edition, and i wanted to use them for my busalon project
the problem is that Pillow, unsurprisingly enough, doesn't actually support loading microsoft's proprietary bitmap font file format! in fact, the only bitmap font format that Pillow did support was some weird combo of an image and some random ass binary format that they made up and didn't actually document. and the only tools Pillow offered for converting fonts into that format, can only use two ancient X Window System font formats, of course(??)
luckily, mkwinfont exists, so i didn't have to figure out how to read microsoft's bitmap font format -- but to figure out Pillow's binary font files, i had no choice but to trudge through their old C code from the 90s to create this conversion utility