ok im getting crazy here

i tried like 28 programs today and not one can do the (supposed simple) thing i need which is basically make comic andy not transparent

anyone know a program that can do it?

Adobe Illustrator should be able to do that I suppose. Not sure if Inkscape can or not. You would probably have to use the "Live trace" function to trace the outlines and then export the ttf file.

Saw this on stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17869228/making-fonts-in-illustrator-photoshop-exporting-them-to-ttf-otf

The supposedly simple task is not so simple, since Comic Andy is designed to be hollowed out of a surrounding blob using the odd-even rule. The author calls that "bold outlining".

If you look at it in a tool like Fontographer, you see how it is modelled (left side of image).

The odd-even rule transforms that into what you see on the right side. There is no way of making the font "non-hollow" (or "non-transparent") other than by tediously removing the outermost path for every single character, by hand, one by one.

That said, I couldn't find a concrete license for that font. Several "free font" sites offer it under alleged licenses ranging from "free" to "Free for Personal and Commercial Use", and the "author's website" given on one font page seems to contain no useful information. No license file included in the ZIP.

So... kind of unclear license... which means that you might not be allowed to modify the font in such a way at all.

i thouht it was free... anywa since i just want to do it for my personal understanding now, couldnt i just add another "layer" as background of my specified color?

or alternative print the TTF into a image and edit that and use it as non TTF font? would that be allowed?

I use layers often and have had to exactly this thing once in a while.

Once you become fast, then it will be much easier, obviously. A lot of practice is what it takes. I recommend accumulating a library of work in case you need this again in the future.

Unfortunately, some things are going to be tedious.

i thouht it was free...

So it says on the sites where you can download it, yes. And most likely, it is, too.

But "free" and "free" is not necessarily the same (especially when it comes as blanket statement from a non-authorative "free font stuffs" website). It may mean "do whatever you want, I don't care", or "use freely, but attribute me", or it may mean "use freely for your personal stuff only", or it may mean "use freely, but don't modify", or "use freely, but if you modify it you must use a different name" (This peculiar type of license actually exists for some fonts. It sounds weird, but the intent is not at all stupid. The idea is that the font is "completely free" but at the same time users can rely to get what they expect from the name, they're not getting swamped with 20 half-assed mods that all have the same name and looks somehow similar, yet aren't exactly the same).

The problem is, only from "free" you don't know which version of "free" the author meant. That doesn't mean you will get in trouble if you modify it, you probably won't. Especially if you don't distribute the modified font, so nobody will know in the first place.

I'm only saying that you don't know for sure what "free" means here and that at least in theory, you might get the author complaining afterwards, in the very worst case.

layers

Well you could sure add a layer behind the main layer (there are now 3 layers if I recall correctly) and paint the "holes" white. Not the complete character box, of course, only so much as to hide the hole. Tedious, need to do that for every single character

Using flood fill on the "holes" in a paint program would of course also work, but that, too, would be tedious. You still have to do it for every character (though it's probably only one click, but still... gets annoying for 100-200 characters).

Using a bitmap font created from a TTF is generally allowable in the EU, regardless of the TTF's license (with obvious exceptions, you can of course still not use e.g. CocaCola's trademarked logo only because you created a bitmap from the CocaCola TTF font), but it might be different in other jurisdictions. I wouldn't know how it's handled for example in the USA.