Howdy everyone! I’m here because I’m making a newsletter for another site, and one of our members wrote an article on the Virtual Boy. I was wondering if anyone could direct me to where to find the Virtual Boy font that I suspect your logo was made with. I’d like to use it for the title of his article.

Thanks, and this site is very well designed. Very pretty.

Hi! The logo was hand made from a high res scan of the VB logo. I can send you our logo in high res if you want. If you make a font out of it, please send it back to me then. 😉

What about these titles? Each letter seem to be a separate .png right now, but maybe they could be made into a font?

Attachments:

1. 

   font-1.png
   

It probably won’t help, but Dan reminded me that I was (and am still) working on this font for Bitmap Font Writer.

I want to eventually add punctuation, digits, and maybe lower-case, as well as making a TTF out of it. Also, as you can see, there are some kerning problems due to the nature of the BFW software…

(PS: KR155E, you might want to think about using CSS sprites for those titles…)

Attachments:

1. 

   sample.png
   

1. a-vb-logo-font.zip

Any word on this? I was actually look for a Virtual Boy Font.

I am almost finished with making a very high res font similar to RunnerPacks, which I need for a poster for the next coding competition. I will post it once it is done.

Good tip to use CSS sprites, RunnerPack, I will give it a try.

Aquanistic, would you mind telling us which site you were talking about?

The high res font is not yet done, but here’s the small one, made from the “Virtual Boy” text on commercial VB games’ IPD/focus adjustment screens.

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1. 

   font-2.png
   

I incorporated the CSS sprites Runnerpack suggested. Works much better now. It also allowed me to have special treatments for space between certain characters, like “W” and “A”, which makes the font look even better. 🙂

I also added those to the forum headers.

There’s still a few characters in the font, which I am not satisfied with, especially the “&”. If anyone could give a redesign of this character a try, that would be great.

Many more foreign and special characters have to be added as well to make the font really complete.

BTW, anyone interested in a little script to turn any user input into this font?

Now it looks weird in Opera 9.21.
It shows both the VB font and the normal font occupying the same space, and it’s a mess. (I’m talking about the text below the path folders)

Again, it looks fine to me, HorvatM… You can’t expect KR155E to make workarounds for every out-of-date version of every browser. Just upgrade. The latest Opera is just as efficient as the 9.x series (and every other version; because Opera always has and always will completely rock ;-))

And about the font, well done, KR155E! Is the “script” you mentioned a tag for the forum that allows using the font in a post? That would be very cool, indeed. If, instead, it’s a script that generates the HTML/CSS for the sprite font, I would still be interested.

To be honest, there are some characters I would also change. The seven seems a bit off, for one. Also, the kerning (spacing between letters) might be a little too small. I realize there isn’t much space to play with in such a small font, though. Adding one pixel at such a size can sometimes be too much… In fact, it’s very hard to make fonts look good at such a small size, especially without anti-aliasing (which is essentially sub-pixel rendering).

For the ampersand, I would suggest some of the other forms might be worth a try. There is the “backwards three” style that some people use. Or the one that looks like “Et”.

I’ve started a vector version of the font in SketchUp, based on the logo in Hedgetrimmer’s excellent cartridge model. It’s going pretty well, but I’ve only got the letters and most of the digits. I’m having trouble with the four, and I’m not quite happy with the five, yet. Also, my method for distinguishing the zero from the “O” doesn’t quite look right.

When I get done, I can fairly easily start making a TTF from it, by exporting to DXF and importing into my font editor (Font Creator). Eventually, I’d like to make a SketchUp plugin that exports TTFs directly (although they’d still have to be tweaked in a standard editor).

Thanks RunnerPack! It’s simply a PHP function, which goes through an input string, and outputs it with a tag around every letter. Each span tag has a certain height and width and the needed part of font.png set as background. The tag also hides the letter it contains through “color: transparent”. There might be a better way, which also works in Opera 9. I didn’t test it in any other browser yet.

With script I meant an input form, with which users could submit any text and get it displayed in this VB font.

I will work some more on the font and fix the ampersand as well as the seven.

Looking forward to the TTF, that will be great! 🙂

There might be a better way, which also works in Opera 9.

Well, it does work now. I’ve noticed you’ve changed the ampersand. It looks much better now.

[KR155E]

HorvatM schrieb:

Well, it does work now. I’ve noticed you’ve changed the ampersand. It looks much better now.

Nice! I changed the way it hides the text from “color: transparent” to “text-indent: -9999px”.

Here’s a quickly thrown together script to generate your own text. Will be made pretty later. 😉
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/usercenter/fontmaker.php

• This reply was modified 14 years, 9 months ago by KR155E.

Wow! Both the new ampersand and that generator form are great!

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the TTF… I haven’t even tried the DXF importing trick, and even if it works it will still be a lot of work.

If the Win32 version of this program worked I could make the converter I mentioned… Of course, there would still be some tweaking involved (hinting and such).

The generator form is seriously lacking. You should include an option that does no conversion if it doesn’t know the input character. Also, input gets converted to html entities before conversion, which results in (Russian) А becoming [font=monospace]#&1040;[/font], same stuff for Japanese (which might be of more interest to this site) and possibly anything else not covered by the “Font”.

cYa,

Tauwasser

HorvatM wrote:
Now it looks weird in Opera 9.21.
It shows both the VB font and the normal font occupying the same space, and it’s a mess. (I’m talking about the text below the path folders)

Actually the same thing is happening for me now on the Games pages.

I use the newest FF, [font=monospace]Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6[/font].

cYa,

Tauwasser

Here’s a beta TTF of the logo font. I wouldn’t use this in production, but it might get someone started…

It’s not kerned, it’s not hinted… the bearings aren’t even set right! But, it proves I’ve actually been doing something 😉

I’ve also attached a tweaked version of Krisse’s bitmap one. I didn’t readjust the spacing (for backward compatibility) but the space around the “A’s” really should be collapsed or it’ll look funny.

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   chrisses-version-lo-res.png
   

1. virtual-boy.zip

Woot! Will try it our asap.

Your changes to my font are very well done, I will add them soon. 🙂

KR155E wrote:
Your changes to my font are very well done, I will add them soon. 🙂

Thanks! I also wanted to make the digits all the same width (as they are/will be in the TTF) because I hate it when you can’t stack a column of numbers. And forget about making a clock or timer with changing width! Yuck!

…but I wanted it to be a “more-or-less” drop-in replacement. It’s your call, though.

EDIT: Of course, with such a simple bitmap font format, you can’t (easily) adjust the kerning. In the TTF, the one will have less space around it when it’s next to letters and (certain) punctuation… Assuming I ever finish it 😛

Also, I just noticed that I changed the internal name of the font, but not the filename. I hope that doesn’t confuse anyone 😉

w00t! Triple-post, FTW! 😛

Well, here’s my nearly-final, public-beta, all-warranties-disclaimed, good-enough-for-government-work version of the VB logo font.

Eat instruction manual before using. 😉

Attachments:

1. virtual-logo.zip