Chortkeh BDF Font Viewer for Windows

Adobe's Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF) is an ASCII-based file format that stores bitmap screen fonts and presents them as text files that can be read by both humans and machines. It's used a lot in Unix, but not so much in Windows. However, as Windows applications spread their capabilities, a growing number of users need to view BDF files in Windows. That's what Chortkeh BDF Font Viewer is for. It's a free, standalone, portable tool that can process BDF font files in Windows and display them in a familiar view. It's part of the Chortkeh Font Toolbox but can be downloaded separately.

This compact tool downloads as a zipped file but requires no installation, opening as soon as you click the extracted executable file, which at less than 300KB is small enough to store and run from just about any sort of portable device or storage medium. It opens with an almost starkly plain interface, just File and Help menus above a blank display, with boxes below that for Glyph and Font information. Opening a BDF font file filled the main window with a gridded image of wide range of characters that will be more familiar to coders and other advanced users, but they're the ones most likely to need BDF Font Viewer. For them, it adds a useful capability to their toolkits, and for free, too.

Some people may need to download a free Windows extension to view BDF Font's Help file, and we had no luck accessing the developer's Web site, though we did find some material about BDF Font Viewer at developer's Komeil Bahmanpour's blog, and the program, font files and other resources are also available at Chortkeh's Microsoft Live Font Toolbox site. Anyone who actually needs BDF Font Viewer should have no trouble finding it.