It is often considered that Vector fonts belong to the past and that they have been superceded by the later TrueType font format. In many situations this may be true, but do not dismiss them too quickly.
Vector fonts are created by drawing short or long lines to form a character. Because of their graphic nature they are scaleable. At larger sizes their structure (of lines) becomes obvious, but at smaller sizes the lines are not seen and curves appear satisfactorily.
The advantage of Vector fonts is that they are extremely easy to draw and may be as simple or complex as required. Small pictures or icons may be included in your VBF fonts.
Font Maker creates Vector fonts as VBF (Vector Base Font) internal format. These may be exported to the Windows Vector (Stroke) format for direct use in Windows.
There is an example using Vector fonts which demontrates several typefaces. It does required a fully Java enabled brower.
The VBF font characters may be converted to the internal TrueType format with a simple trace facility.
In the Professional version of Font Maker VBF fonts may be converted to Bitmap fonts of a given point size, and then exported to various printer formats.
Vector fonts in DOS
Derval Computer Services offers simple utilities, called VBFPLOT, to present VBF fonts on the VDU screen from DOS.
VBFPLOT comes in two forms, a QBASIC example using source code for use in your own programs and a similar C source ready for compiling. The C version includes a ready complied .EXE file. The example programs demonstrate the use of VBF fonts directly in a simple program. They assume familiarity with QBASIC or C.
The Utilities will read a VBF font and allow the user to embed the following parameters:
Following the parameters the Write function/subroutine may be called to display the text as selected. Further selections and Write calls may be added for further effects.
VBFPLOT is available as a download (46Kbytes). It contains five files: