FNT (Windows Font)

File Format
Name	FNT (Windows Font)
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Fonts FNT (Windows Font)
Extension(s)	.fnt

FNT is a mostly-obsolete bitmap or stroked (vector) font format associated with Microsoft Windows. FNT-format fonts are most commonly found inside resources of New Executable (sometimes Portable Executable) files, particularly in dedicated FON (.fon) files. They may also appear standalone (without a container), where they have the extension .fnt.

Identification

Such fonts files begin with a nil-byte. The next byte contains a value in range from one to three. These two bytes correspond to the version of the font file.

Then the file size is stored as a 4 byte little endian value. Since a font can contain a maximum of 255 characters and a few bytes are required per character description, this size is usually in the thousands. Since the file header alone is more than 100 bytes, the size of a theoretically minimal FNT file with only one character is larger than 100.

From offset 80 three properties of the font are saved in one byte each. These font properties are italic, underlined and strikeout. If the font has the property in question, the corresponding value is one. Otherwise the value is zero.

Software

• PSF Tools
• Fony.exe to edit Windows bitmap fonts in FON/FNT format.
• mkwinfont
• dewinfont

Sample files

• http://www.vsoft.nl/software/utils/win/fontedit/fontedit.zip → SAMPLE.FNT
• dexvert samples — font/windowsFont

Links

• Windows Developers Notes: Font-File Format - Covers versions 2 and 3 of the format.
• Windows 1.03 Programmer's Reference (PDF) - Appendix C describes version 1 of the format.
• MSDN: CharacterSet Enumeration - Codes used by the dfCharSet field
• mkwinfont