Creating a font is simple. Simply download the archives from http://planetsourcecode.com , or http://lostsidedead.com/mxsdl
or the binary setup application to install a already compiled editor into your Program files from http://lostsidedead.com/mxsdl/setup.exe
Then Open the application

You should see the following:

Now heres the fun part. To *RiP* a windows font click the Edit->Convert Font in the menu and you should see a dialog alot like the following.

select the font and the size, dont worry if it dosent seem to fit into the paint window the drawing algorithm will automaticly size the font to the display window. The Next Dialog that comes up is the following:
This dialog is pretty self explaintory. Just click "Create" and it will scan through all the characters, and convert them to the MXF format. It does this using a Simple GDI Trick that i figured out one night when I was bored. Im sure microsoft will fix it in future versions of windows. You can see it scan through the characters it goes really fast on my 3.4 GHZ p4 Next you will see the font displayed in the draw window. Selec tthe pencil , eraser, fill tools to change the font as you see fit.
Next all you gotta do is save it than by clicking File->Save As

Be Sure to Check out the About Dialog and Visit http://lostsidedead.com for more freeware and source code.
Now the Tricky part is using the font, Its actually quite easy. All you gotta do is create a instance of SDL_Font with pure SDL or mxFont with mxSDL than with pure SDL call SDL_read_font or with mxSDL call read_font or simply use the C++ wrapper class mxText with mxSDL or SDL_Text with pure SDL.

more on this later

-Jared Bruni