In developing a flash-based memory manager, I need to be able to view large quantities of data. With my eyes and monitor resolution, I can read hand-drawn 3×5 letters on a 4×6 matrix without too much difficulty, but none of the system TrueType fonts render optimally at that size. I’ve tried writing code to draw font shapes to off-screen bitmaps, and then use DrawImage to copy those bitmaps to the screen, but I can’t get good performance. This is for development, not production, so performance doesn’t have to be absolutely optimal, but I don’t want to spend too long waiting for screens of data to refresh.
What would be the best way of either making .net display a font which is pixel-perfect what I want, or else building a bitmap out of lots of little pieces quickly? I’m using vb.net, so I can’t simply generate a bitmap as a byte array and pass that to the Bitmap constructor unless someone can show me how to convert an array into an IntPtr.
I would suggest creating the font yourself. There are several good font editors out there:
Font Forge — http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
FontCreator — http://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator.html
Type Light — http://cr8.netfirms.com/typelight.html
TTFEdit — http://sourceforge.net/projects/ttfedit/
DoubleType — http://doubletype.org/wiki/index.php/DoubleType