BitPull

The BitPull system is not really a font. It uses fonts to draw type, but there aren’t any readable letters in them. BitPull fonts contain building blocks for bitmaps. By putting the right shapes in the right order you can then draw any bitmapped form, letters included. These building blocks consist of vertical columns of pixels structured on a grid. The advantage over real bitmapped letters is this: BitPull fonts are made of outlines so the pixels can have any shape, width and detail.

That’s nice in theory, but making text that way is difficult — building one single letter can take hours. A small program to the rescue: the BitPuller. The application has a font menu with a series of specially designed bitmap fonts, a preview area and a place to enter new text. Type the text, select the font and convert the image to a line of BitPull gibberish. Set this gibberish in the right BitPull font and it magically transforms back into legible text.

Then the fun really starts. Where the eye sees a single letter, a lay-out program sees a whole string of characters. Increase letter space in a BitPull text and the space appears between the columns of pixels, i.e. within the letters. Put a line of BitPull text on a curved path and the letters will smoothly follow it, because each character (each column of pixels) is rotated along the curve. Excellent for animation.