I'm not angry
My point is just that we have a small community, not a lot of people, not enough time, so all the effort spent ideally should be toward things that are impacting our ability to use the oric or do things for it.
Tools that run on modern machine and make it much easier to do things (like animation sequences, sprite generators, painting program that is aware of the unique Oric HIRES constraints) would definitely be welcome.
The way you exposed your idea did not seem to me any simpler than just painting a picture directly in a painting program, but thinking of it I can see ways to actually bring added value:
- Make it possible to type some arbitrary texts and see them dynamically change when the character set is being edited
- Provide a way to edit blocks of characters at the same time (say 2x2 characters that represent a sprite for a TEXT mode)
- Ability to load a True Type font and have it overlaid with the edited characters to help create charsets based on known fonts
- Possibility to load existing fonts and make easy variants (italic-ize, bold-ify, add accents)
- Possibility to visualize in different modes, like double sized, different background or foreground colors
Since you are not a programmer, but obviously have ideas, why not make a design, possibly some mock-up pictures or how the whole tool would work, the user interface, menus, etc... and then try to find somebody to work with your to help the thing become a reality?
PS: I'm pretty sure it's the type of tool that could entirely be done as a web application, a bit like
http://www.favicon.cc