AP: Is it possible to make text 1 pixel wide?

[FlynnAffinity]

I am doing some screen mockups for a project I am working on.  I like to mimic the text that is drawn by the OS.  Windows 11 Pro.  Here is a screen snip.  (image of 35.70)

 

If I use the Frame Text tool and adjust the point size, I get aliased text.  I figured out how to turn off aliasing, but the width of the line in the characters are still a couple pixels in thickness.   Is there a way to have the text render as it does like on screen text?

What I've been doing as a work-around is use my application to display every character that I need, screenshot that, then bring that into AP and make little tiny images of each character that have the same height so I can easily line them up by baseline.

 

I am using Affinity Photo v2.2.0 on Windows 11 Pro.

[Old Bruce]

14 minutes ago, FlynnAffinity said:

I like to mimic the text that is drawn by the OS.

Problem is that the OS draws the glyphs in the screen's pixel grid and we draw the glyphs where ever we want to. Our text may not be in the best location and may not be the best size with the best spacing. Those two things, location and size, are taken care of by the OS.

[NotMyFault]

You can find fonts specifically crafted to mimic legacy pixel fonts. Some are converted from e.g. IBM PC and other pre-graphics area.

Another way (I have done this before) is braking down images of pixel fonts into individual letters, and save them as assets. Then arrange the letters like learned in school for a collage.

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, FlynnAffinity said:

but the width of the line in the characters are still a couple pixels in thickness. 

I am not sure what exactly you want to achieve. So just in case: In the early 2000s there have been "Pixel fonts", designed to fit in a squared grid for 'optimal' display in small sizes in the hardware pixels of a monitor. This fonts became irrelevant with improved / increased screen resolution (smaller pixels).

 

In the ~1990s there have been "Stroke fonts" which seem to be not defined by an outline but a single line (stroke) only. For instance the character L would not be defined by six coordinates (top left, top right, …) but three only (top, bottom, bottom right). If I remember correctly Apple had a very early version of "Courier" with this technology. – You seem to have such a font type in mind with your "still a couple pixels in thickness" which maybe caused by the outline + fill of nowadays type, different to a stroke + stroke width only. – Unfortunately I don't find useful info, just some pages that mention them, for instance

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2004006166

Quote

SCALABLE STROKE FONT SYSTEM AND METHOD

A method of creating font format data from source font data includes analyzing the source font data to obtain glyph data for a plurality of glyphs, dissecting the glyph data, extracting midline data from the dissected glyph data, classifying the midline data as unique element data and common element data, (…)

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/TclFont

Technology for creation, display, and printing of scalable _stroke_ fonts defined as Tcl scripts. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20000301121854/http://www.curvesoft.com/tools.html

Quote

 

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Free Tools

T1UTILS

There is a set of programs packaged under the name 't1utils' and originally written by I. Lee Hetherington. These tools, inter alia, allow you to dump a Type 1 font in human readable ASCII form and to reconvert this form back to a Type 1 font. They can be useful in debugging programs (such as FontScope-PS) that deal with Type 1 fonts. CurveSoft has made some bug fixes and enhancements to these tools; the modified package is available here. As usual, you will need the gzip and tar programs to unpack the archive. A zip archive of the original package for DOS is here.

TclPresents

TclPresents is a pure Tcl/Tk package for doing presentations released under terms of the GPL. It allows you to display pages of text with itemized lists and supports a variety of styles for numbering the list items. It can be used for very effective presentations since the full power of Tcl canvas graphics commands are available for display of complex graphics, simple animations etc. The distribution includes a sample 3-page presentation where the Tk canvas graphics commands are used to paint a nice decorative frame around each page. TclPresents is not WYSYWYG: The page descriptions must be typed into a separate file with a text editor using HTML-style tags . Some knowledge of Tcl/Tk is probably essential for using TclPresents effectively.

TclFont

TclFont is technology for creation, display and printing of scalable _stroke_ fonts defined as TCL scripts released under the terms of the GPL. It consists of 4 parts:

1. A sample stroke font named 'Pencil' where each glyph is defined by a small TCL procedure. Two types of strokes are currently supported: straight lines and conic curves. Pencil includes almost all the ISO-8859 glyphs with the exception of a couple of ligatures. The design is Courier-like though variable width.
2. A set of C++ files which allow stroke fonts to be arbitrarily scaled and displayed on the screen. The pen diameter can also be varied.
3. A set of TCL procedures for creating a downloadable scalable PostScript Type 3 font from a stroke font (currently this requires at least a Level 2 RIP since it uses the 'strokeadjust' operator to keep stroke widths uniform).
4. A set of TCL procedures for a large size display of single glyphs (this is useful when creating new glyphs).

TclFont should be regarded as experimental since it has received only limited testing. The C++ code should be 64-bit clean since it has been tested on Linux-Alpha.

TCL Tools

Here are a few TCL scripts that we have found useful. Currently, the archive contains the following scripts:

colors

This script is very similar to the 'xcolors' program which seems to be missing in many UNIX installations (e.g. recent versions of Red Hat Linux). It parses the 'rgb.txt' file and displays all the colors alongside their names in a TK canvas.

pixmaps

This script reads all the pixmap files (.xpm) in a given directory using the pixmap image item of tix and displays them alongside the file names in a TK canvas. Recent versions of Red Hat Linux come bundled with a large number of pixmaps in /usr/share/pixmaps/mini

badstyle

This script checks source files for violations of some of the CurveSoft coding guidelines: (a) lines longer than 72 chars (b) embedded TABs (c) blanks at the end of lines.

If you have trouble with ftp downloads on the above links, try these links for http download: T1UTILS, TclFont, and TCL Tools.

 

Attached an archive of a tools folder for the mentioned script language TCL. Its ReadMe starts with "This directory has the TclFont package which enables you to create and use TCL based scalable stroke fonts; a sample stroke font called 'Pencil' is also included. (…)". 

tclfont Folder.zip

[FlynnAffinity]

Thanks for the input everyone!  @thomaso I'll dive into your post when I get some time, but this appears to be very helpful!  What I've done in the past is exactly what @NotMyFault suggested.  Although I didn't save them as assets, I should do that.