display bitmap fonts over 8px correctly?

[whistl3r]

hey guys!

has been a long time since i did a post here at neowin, well i'm glad to be here again...

well i guess everyone knows the sizing problems with bitmap fonts like kroeger or hooge, if u size them larger than 6pts or 8px they look very crappy. so here's the problem, windows uses in its dialog windows generally the size of 8pts/10px, so bitmap fonts get completely unuseable here because they look like crap and they are quite hard to read. now, my question is, how can i get the look of bitmap fonts the same, no matter if it's 6pts or 10pts, u know what i mean? u could say i want to freeze the sizing between 6pts and 12pts, 12 pts because hooge (dunno if any others do the same) will be displayed at this size correctly again...i know it's doable because the font "nu" has this feature! well i hope i didnt confuse u now, just tell me what u think of this problem, any solutions? i know one way, to hack each dialog with reshacker but 1st i dont know all dll's which have dialogs in it and 2nd this way would take years.

well thx for reading (and maybe answering)

[NightCrawler]

Been there and done it........

There's only one way to do this...... you need to convert the .ttf to .fon. I used Softy to convert it and limit it to 6px only.

Then replace the ms shell fontsubstitutes in your registry with yours.

Two advanced warnings....

Do not use both the .ttf and .fon in your fonts folder as it will cause explorer to crash.

If the font is too wide it will screw up several dialog boxes including the XP style shutdown box. I fixed mine by editing the classic shutdown box.

Hope this helps.....

NC