DrawFontMADS - by Alpobemp & DK - © 2011

Introduction

DrawFontMADS program helps editing Font Files from MADS (Microprose Adventure Development System) Engine Adventure Games by Microprose. (Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, Return of the Phantom, Dragonsphere)

Starting Up

Using DrawFontMADS is very simple, but it is required that you have already extracted font files with extension .FF (DrawFontMADS does not do it for you (and reasonably it will not ever do)). Firstly, you have to open a font file: DrawFontMADS does not allow editing a charset from scratch, and if you try anyway, it does not manage automatically any consequent system error, with unpredictable results.
To open a font file, selecting the MenuBar Item "File", you can access the "Open Charset File .FF..." item, which opens your average open file dialog box.

Editing a Font

Once the file has been loaded, in the CharSet Box, the one on the left of the screen, you can see all the characters in thumbnails; by clicking a character, its glyph will be displayed in the EditChar Box. Every square of the grid corresponds with a pixel on the screen.
You can modify and edit the glyph as you please by:

• changing the colour of a pixel,  selecting it by the Colour Select Box, from one up to four colours (black, roughly speaking, is the "transparent" colour) and then clicking a square in the grid of the EditChar Box;
• widening or tightening it, operating on the up-down button "Width" to modify the width and then clicking the button on the right "Wider/Tighter" (Note that one cannot modify the high of a glyph. The reason is that one should raise or lower consequently all the glyphs of the character set, with unpredictable results.);
• replacing a glyph, substituting it with a copy of another glyph: to do it, just select the char you want to copy on the CharSet Box,  type the char you want to be replaced in the edit control next to the command button  "Copy current char in position:", and click the button; a confirmation windows will pop up.

All the changes will be definitively committed only selecting the sub-item "Save and Compress" in the MenuBar Item "File".

Using the Matching Pairs Table
Presuming one wants to use DrawFontMADS to edit special characters in its own language, it is presumable as well one wants to use them. Since it is quite difficult to remember to type, let's say, "<" instead of "ç" (as one, always presumably, will replace those character less used with its special ones), DrawFontMADS can help you in using redesigned character. Once you have modified a char, let's say as before you have draw a "ç" glyph substituting the "<" glyph, write in the Matching Pairs Table the old and the new character.

The Matching Pairs Table writes and is initialized by a local file, 'teresa.txt" (why "teresa"? why not?), by default assumed to be on the same directory where the font file to edit resides ; if it does not exist there, the program try to find it in the parent directory, and if not found there, it loads an empty Matching Pairs Table. Otherwise, if such a file is found, it is loaded in the Matching Table, assuming that it has the following structure:

• Number of rows (hexadecimal): 1 byte;
• OldChar1 (char): 1 byte;
• NewChar1 (char): 1 byte;
• ...
• ...
• OldCharN (char): 1 byte;
• NewCharN (char): 1 byte;

  so that a N-elements-table has a ‘teresa.txt’ file corresponding to a 2*N+1 bytes, with the first byte equal to the hexadecimal representation of N. You are free to choose whether editing manually this file and let the program load it or editing in the table and then saving it.
The Matching Pairs Table is saved automatically by the "Save and Compress" feature.
There is only one Matching Pairs Table for all the Fonts in a directory. It's up to the user to ensure coherence between the substituted glyphs and the entries of the Matching Pairs Table.