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From: chappell@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Glenn Chappell)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.ascii
Subject: Re: Talk: Figlet
Date: 14 Jul 1994 16:44:06 -0500
Organization: Math Dept., University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
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In article <300qaq$16v@gagme.wwa.com> syncomm@cyberspace.net (Greg Hayes) writes:
>
> I know this will sound lame :) But how do you make your own fonts
>for figlet fonts on figlet... I tried editing a few fonts and it keeps
>screwing up. I think the problem is in the first line the 
>
>flfa$ 4 3 20 8 2
>
>... if you can tell me what the numbers mean I think I ca work out the
>rest. Figlet seems to be a big help to ascii art...

Thanx!

I wrote a section on font creation in the figlet man page: "FONT FILE
FORMAT". It evidently hasn't been too helpful for many people. :-(
You'll also find some comments on the meaning of the numbers at the
beginning of "standard.flf".

Anyway, first of all, a figlet font has to begin with "flf2", so the
line you gave won't work. It probably should be "flf2a$ 4 3 20 8 2".
The next character is reserved for future expansion, and should always
be "a", for now.

The next character is the "hardblank", usually "$". This acts like an
unsmush-able character, but prints as a blank; this is useful for
getting fonts to fit together the way you want; however, you can usually
not worry about hardblanks and get away with it. Just stick a "$" here,
and everything should be fine.

After the hardblank character comes a space, followed by 5
space-separated integers. These are

- the height of a character, in lines
- the height of a character excluding descenders, in lines
- the maximum length of a line in the font data. figlet uses this to
determine how much memory to allocate for the buffer it reads font lines
into. Making this number a bit too big is no problem. 100 will probably
work for most reasonable fonts.
- The default "smushmode" for the font. This should usually be -1, 0 or
15. Possible smushmodes range from -1 through 63, and a complet
description of them is in the figlet man page, but, again, -1, 0 or 15
is usually good enough. To find out which mode is best for your font,
try it with several, using the -m option. For example,
"figlet -f myfont -m 15" will use the font "myfont" with smushmode 15.
- The number of comment lines between the first line of the file and the
font data.

So, e.g., in the example you gave (if the "2" is added), the hardblank
is "$". The characters are 4 lines high, 3 of which are above the
baseline. No line in the font data is more than 20 characters long. The
default smushmode is 8, and there are 2 comment lines. Make sense?

				Glenn Chappell   <><
				e-mail: ggc@uiuc.edu