.FON

Introduction

A .fon file holds the bitmap fonts of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 1.0 onwards. These are the fonts of early Windows screens, such as MS Sans Serif, Courier and Terminal, drawn pixel by pixel at a few fixed sizes. Windows still ships and uses some of them, for example for the Terminal font of the console and in old programs.

A .fnt file is a single font resource on its own, and a .fon file packs one or more of them together.

Structure

A .fon file is a 16-bit Windows NE executable with no code, used only as a container for resources. It starts with MZ, and the offset at 0x3C points to the NE header, whose resource table lists one FONT resource per size or style and a FONTDIR resource that summarises them. Each FONT resource is the content of a .fnt file: a header with the version (2.0 or 3.0), the point size, resolution, character height and range, the face name and a table of character widths and offsets, followed by the glyph bitmaps. Some .fnt files hold vector fonts instead, made of strokes.

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