- Select a font from among those installed on your system. This is also where you will set the size (in pixels) of the font, and can make it bold or italic. Create your character set You can 'paint-in' the characters you want to be included in your font. It is a good idea to select only the characters you really need to have in your bitmap font.
- The Bitmap Font Generator is a free program to generate bitmap fonts from true type fonts. The bitmaps are generated in such a way as to leave as little unused space as possible. Position of the characters in the bitmap is not regular so you'll need the generated font descriptor file to determine how to draw each character.
- Bitmap Font Generator - Documentation. Back to main page. How to interpret the values in the font descriptor file. The image to the right illustrates some of the values found in the font descriptor file.The two dotted lines shows the lineHeight, i.e. How far the cursor should be moved vertically when moving to the next line. The base value is how far from the top of the cell height the base.
Hiero or BMFont are nice tools when it comes to generating bitmap fonts offline, adding fancy effects like dropshadows and similar things. However, this also means that you have to generate various versions of your fonts, for different screen sizes and resolutions, a tedious process, that is not exact.
Also if you're looking for messy text, or glitchy text, visit this creepy zalgo text generator (another translator on LingoJam). After generating your fancy text symbols, you can copy and paste the 'fonts' to most websites and text processors.
For the Reddit app i’m working on i needed something more flexibel. Thus i wrapped FreeType, the goto FOSS solution when it comes to font rendering. The code can be found in the gdx-freetype project in SVN. It allows you to generate BitmapFontData and BitmapFont instances on the fly from TrueType font files. Here’s how you use it:
- If you use to big of a size, things might explode. BitmapFonts still only support a single atlas page at the moment, something i’ll try to fix in the next couple of weeks.
- Asian scripts “might” work, see caveat above though. They contain just to many glyphs. I’m thinking about ways to fix this.
- Right-to-left scripts like arabic are a no-go. The layouting “algorithms” in BitmapFont and BitmapFontCache have no idea how to handle that.
- Throwing just any font at FreeType is not a super awesome idea. Some fonts in the wild are just terrible, with bad or no hinting information and will look like poopoo.
Online Bitmap Font Generator
That being said, i’ll try to improve support of more complex scripts, arabic would be nice 🙂 But i guess there’s a reason for this bug on the Android tracker.
Comments are closed.