RE: [Freetype] Best approach to get anti-aliased font bitmaps?

[Pedriana, Paul]

In asking for hand-tuned anti-aliased bitmaps, I am coming from 
the computer game industry. In the game industry, we've used 
such bitmapped fonts for years. That's what all the top-notch 
game companies have done and that's what we did here with 
"SimCity 3000" and "The Sims". 

The problem is that we'd like to be able to use FreeType to draw 
fonts, but we can't use it to draw the "Comic Sans" font that 
The Sims uses because we can't redistribute that proprietary 
TrueType font. To use it, we need to have it as an (anti-aliased) 
bitmap in order to circumvent licensing issues.

I can think of only a few resolutions to our problem, in order
from easiest to hardest:

   - Do a modification to the .fon (Windows bitmapped font)
     driver to allow it to anti-alias for you (like Brian 
     Stell's Mozilla work).

   - Create a new FreeType font driver that reads a grayscale 
     font format of our own design.

   - Dump FreeType and go with our older font system. :(

   - Make a copycat version of "ComicSans.ttf". Not easy.
     No conventional font house will do it, for fear of 
     retribution from Microsoft. So we'd have to do it 
     ourselves or find some kind of "rogue" font maker.

Any other suggestions or comments on the above options?

Paul