Consoleet is an umbrella name for my endeavours surrounding text-oriented consoles, bitmap fonts and otherwise, color considerations, and generally retro look-and-feel. Cornerstone observations as a software developer who is using text all the time:

Utilities

vfontas (originally "VGA font file assembler") can read/write bitmap fonts from/to a number of formats and transform the glyphs in various ways. vfontas is able to generate outline fonts from bitmapped fonts.
Read support: x11-bdf vfontas-clt dos-cpi dos-fnt gnu-hex linux.kbd-unimap linux.kbd-psf1 linux.kbd-psf2+unimap.
Write support: x11-bdf vfontas-clt dos-fnt linux.kbd-unimap linux.kbd-unimap linux.kbd-psf2+unimap fontforge-sfd pbm.
(Additional read/write support through other utilities like fontforge: x11-pcf ttf otf woff win-fon adobe-ps1.)

palcomp can be used to generate palettes for terminals. The most important realization is that programs running within a terminal and which use console_codes(4) to set colors rely on the contrast of the colors produced by a color pairing to be proportional to the contrast those two codes have when using the VGA color palette. For this reason, a mainstay of this program is to operate using a colorspace with perceptual uniformity, i.e. CIELAB/LCh.

As of 2022-11-20, the utilities related to font and color manipulation have been split off hxtools and moved to the Consoleet project. There is now a consoleet-utils source code tree.

Conversion tryout: vfontas -loadpsf <(gzip -cd /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat1-16.psfu.gz) -setname lat -savesfd lat.sfd && fontforge lat.sfd; then {File > Export > {select OTF}, Save to ~/.fonts/lat.otf}.

Articles

Fonts

OTF remakes, in blocky and in smooth variants.