README.md Yet another bitmap font generator. Utility for create texture atlases with bitmap chars from FreeType,TrueType and some other font formats.
Font Builder does almost everything I need. Both Font Studio and Angel Code's BMFont and perform similar tasks. Here are some of Font Builders features.
README.md Yet another bitmap font generator. Utility for create texture atlases with bitmap chars from FreeType,TrueType and some other font formats.
• A QT app, and so works equally well on all platforms. • Open source so it can easily extend the app if needed • Designed to allow custom image and description(layout) exporters, making it even easier to extend • Loads fonts from the filesystem instead of windows registry. This makes it a ton easier to generate texture fonts from my own TTFs. • Auto sizes the final image so I don't need to guess( like in FontStudio). Further, these textures can be constrained to be power of 2 sizes.
• Kerning pairs are supported, so that info can be exported if your TTF uses them. It's not all perfect however. The default layout plugins suck. The Box layout tool just fills the texture from top left to bottom right using the characters alphabetically. Not very efficient. I changed it to sort the characters by height first and quickly improved its efficiency (a 2 line change).
There are many complicated and feature-rich tools out there but my favorite tool for building bitmap fonts is. It's a simple tool which does one thing very well.
It's clearly documented with tips for implementation. Like most bitmap font creators, it is of course graphics API independent because it simply exports an image (and an easy to read data structure). However, implementing your own text-rendering system, in OpenGL or Direct3D, is not too difficult--render a quad for each letter and apply the bitmap font texture with appropriate coordinates. I hope this helps! Note: This is a Win32 application only, but I still recommend it!
The last time I was looking for this (for an iPhone game), I tried various options but couldn't find one that did everything I wanted. I needed to render a single texture using very small characters from a commercial TTF font. I needed to be able to specify character ranges so it would only contain the characters I needed.
I wanted it to pack the glyphs as tightly as it could. I needed texture coordinates at runtime.
I didn't care about 'real' kerning, but I needed glyph measurements at runtime so it would be spaced sensibly. So I wrote a small Windows app that rendered all the characters and saved out the ABC spacings (as reported by Windows) along with texture coordinates. BTW, if you want to render very small text (like less than 16 pixels high) under XP or Vista, you will run into shortcomings with Windows' anti-aliasing. An easy fix for me was to use to get transparent supersampling. If I were starting over, I'd probably take the same approach but look at FreeType2 instead of native text rendering.