Sort out and tidy up your bitmaps. They should all be monochrome and ideally the same height. If you have more than 233, you will need to make more than one font to hold them all.
Start Softy. Select Font Type / Bitmap. When the Bitmap Font editing window appears, click its File / New menu item.
A dialog box appears for entering the Font Header details. You must enter a Name (up to 16 characters) and Ascent and Descent values appropriate to the required size of the font and the resolution of the device (screen, printer) on which it will be used. Each pixel in a font bitmap represents a pixel that will be displayed or printed, so a font which is quite legible on a 72 dots per inch (dpi) VGA screen could be totally unreadable on a 300dpi printer. Windows does scale bitmap fonts up when there is no alternative, but the results are not attractive. The Resolution boxes in the dialog should be completed for the target device.
Other boxes are best completed at this stage. The character set should be identified. If the font is to contain the normal selection of upper and lower case letters and numbers, it should be set to ANSI. If it is to contain a collection of pictures, symbols etc, it should be set to Symbol. If the font is a monospaced font to be used in a DOS command prompt Window, it should be set to OEM.
Click on OK to set the font header values. If any need to be changed, this can be done at any time.
Characters in the font now have to be defined. The character list to the left of the editing window contains a number of blank boxes at this stage. Each of these represent an empty (as yet) character. The first one is for the character number defined as the 'First Character' in the header dialog (normally 32), and the last being for the character number defined as the 'Last Character'. Double clicking on any of these boxes causes it to be selected for editing. Its number and width will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the window. The widths will all be zero.
The first character to be set should be character 32 - the space character. Click on the first box in the list, and check that the character number really is 32. Then set the width of the space for your font by either clicking on the Width / Widen menu item or press Ctrl+W until the required width is displayed on the status bar. If the font is to be monospaced, the space should be the same width as all the other characters.
The other characters can now be created from the bitmaps. If the font is to have the ANSI or OEM character set, character 33 should be the exclamation mark '!'. For Symbol fonts, there is no preferred order. If you are using a symbol font where character 33 is a picture of a duck, and you enter an exclamation mark on the keyboard, you should get a duck character... To see the numbers for other characters in an ANSI font, look at an existing example. Windows still has a few around, even in these days of TrueType.
The easiest way to turn your bitmap into a character is to double click on the blank entry for the character. This brings the empty character into the editing window ready for updating. Use a separate bitmap editing program such as Windows Paint to load the bitmap file, then select it (or the required part of it) and Edit / Copy it. This places it on the Clipboard. Back to Softy, and click on Edit / Paste. If the Paste item is grayed out, this is probably because you haven't yet double clicked on a character to update. You may get a message saying that the bitmap is wider than the font cell width, and do you want to make the cell wider? The answer depends on a number of things. If the font is monospaced, the font width should already have been set when the width of the space was set, so 'No' is probably the right answer. For proportional fonts, the answer is probably 'Yes'. Try it and see what happens!
When the bitmap has been pasted into the editing window, it can be changed if required. Click on a pixel in the grid with the left mouse button to set it. Use the right mouse button to clear it. The character can be made wider or narrower using the Width menu items or the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+W and Ctrl+R. The bitmap can be moved up or down, from side to side, or slices taken out of the middle, using the Column and Row menu items.
When the character has been edited, click on the Edit / Update menu item. The character should appear in the list on the left. Until this has been done, no permanent changes have been made to the font, and the original empty character can be restored by double clicking on its box in the list.
When all required characters have been created, the font can be saved. In fact its a good idea to save it at various stages along the way. Like all software packages, Softy has bugs which can cause it to crash. Any work done since the last Save (if any!) is lost if this happens. To save the file the first time, use the File / Save As menu item. This brings up a standard Windows dialog allowing you to select the directory in which to save the file. The 'Save as file type' box should already be set to show Windows font (*.FON) as the file type to Save As. Type in the file name you want to use (leave out the .FON), and press Ok. You will then get another dialog box showing the details of the .FON file that Softy is about to create. Click Ok to confirm.
When the file has been created for the first time, subsequent updates can be made using the Save command. This brings up the Softy dialog showing the details of the .FON file. The only difference is that the updated file will be shown as replacing the existing one, rather than being used to create a new file.
When you finally get to the end of this fairly tedious job, you have to install the font before you can use it. First make sure that a .FON file containing a font whose name clashes with the name of your font is not already installed (possible as a previous version of your font). The names that matter are the Font Names of the individual fonts in a .FON, as shown in the Font Header dialog. Use Windows Control Panel, click the Fonts icon, then select Add or Install New font. Select the directory in which you have created the .FON file. You should then see your font listed. Highlight it, and click Ok.
Try it out! The first thing is to use the Windows Font Viewer. Find the .FON file in a file listing (use My Computer, File Manager etc), then double click on the entry for the .FON file. You should see a few details and a sample of the characters.