COLORF.FNT Format

This document describes the font format used by the Wasteland 1 COLORF.FNT file.

It covers:

• the top-level file layout
• the per-glyph record structure
• the bitplane layout
• color decoding

Scope

COLORF.FNT contains a sequence of fixed-size font glyph records.

Each glyph is:

• width: 8 pixels
• height: 8 pixels

There is no header, no compression wrapper, and no per-glyph metadata.

File Layout

The file is a simple concatenation of fixed-size glyph records until EOF.

• bytes per glyph: 32
• glyph count: fileSize / 32

For a valid file, the total file size must be a multiple of 32.

In the shipped Wasteland 1 data:

• colorf.fnt is 5504 bytes
• therefore it contains 172 glyph records

Glyph Record Layout

Each glyph record is 32 bytes long and consists of four 1-bit planes of 8 bytes each:

Offset	Size	Meaning
+0x00	8	Blue plane
+0x08	8	Green plane
+0x10	8	Red plane
+0x18	8	Intensity plane

Each plane stores one byte per image row:

• 8 rows
• 1 byte per row
• 8 pixels per byte

Bits are read most-significant-bit first within each byte.

Pixel Addressing

For a pixel (x, y):

bitIndex = 7 - x
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The plane bytes for row y are:

blueByte      = data[y + 0]
greenByte     = data[y + 8]
redByte       = data[y + 16]
intensityByte = data[y + 24]
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So each row is distributed across four different bytes, one in each plane.

Color Decoding

The final 4-bit palette index is built from the four plane bits:

blueBit      = (blueByte      >> bitIndex) & 1
greenBit     = (greenByte     >> bitIndex) & 1
redBit       = (redByte       >> bitIndex) & 1
intensityBit = (intensityByte >> bitIndex) & 1
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Combined as:

colorIndex =
    (blueBit      << 0) |
    (greenBit     << 1) |
    (redBit       << 2) |
    (intensityBit << 3)
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This yields a 4-bit color value in the range 0..15.

Unlike the sprite and cursor formats, COLORF.FNT does not contain a separate transparency mask. Every glyph pixel is always visible and is represented directly by its 4-bit palette index.

Decoding Summary

To decode glyph n:

1. Read 32 bytes from the file at offset n * 32.
2. For each pixel (x, y), read one bit from each of the four planes for row y.
3. Combine the four bits into the 4-bit palette index.

Validation Notes

Useful consistency checks when implementing a reader:

• the file size should be a multiple of 32
• each glyph record must be exactly 32 bytes
• each plane must contain exactly 8 bytes
• bits must be interpreted most-significant-bit first within each byte