Several of my projects, e.g. the spinning sign, have required that I generate fonts to be displayed. However, my google searches turned up a quite disappointing collection of font resources. I decided to build a simple font editor so that I could build my own fonts.
To keep things simple, I decided to do everything in ascii rather than try to build a GUI. The input is a formatted text file, and the output is a fragment of C code. I write the translator in Perl, which is readily available from a number of sources for almost all platforms, e.g. from active state. The code for the translator is here.
One thing about the output of the translator - it places a comma at the end of every line (laziness on my part). You will need to delete the last comma on the last line to generate valid C code.
The input must be a properly formatted text file. Here is an example of a 5x7 bitmap font. Be certain to use a fixed-width font in your text editor to properly view the file (e.g. courier). Any non-space character gets interpreted as a set bit, in this file I just use 'X' characters. With the font editor, you can modify the 5x7 fonts, or even create your own font sets. For example, here are the Futhark fonts I use for the moon clock.