[Mattias Gustavsson]

As I couldn't find an existing tool which met my requirements, I've written by own utility to generate a bitmap font from a true-type font, which is quite useful for when you want to use a font in a game but don't want to buy the full distribution rights to it...

It can be downloaded here (source code included):
PixieFGT_1_0.zip

And the syntax is:
PixieFGT fontname size [spacing] [-antialias] [-texture]

The optional parameter spacing gives you that many empty pixels around each character, so there's room to add things like dropshadow or glow in your image editing software.

The optional flag -texture will give you the characters arranged on a bitmap of power-of-two size, and if the flag is not specified, they will be placed on one long horizontal strip instead (which is what I most often use for fonts in Pixie, as it makes it easier to apply gradients to the font in photoshop).

If you specify -antialias, the font will be generated at 16 times the requested size, and then downsampled, for high quality antialias.

Here's an example of how a generated font bitmap might look:


And along with it you also get an XML file which specifies which character can be found in which area of the bitmap.

The XML file also contains kerning information, which you could make use of if you want. What it basically tells you is that if a character with the ascii value matching the "first"-value was rendered, followed immediately by one matching the "second"-value, the second character should be moved horizontally by the specified amount, so that, for example, "A" and "V" are placed closer together than "A" and "L"...

The source code is public domain as usual.
_________________
www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[RedSlash]

This is something I need! awesome. Though I'm not that hot on the XML based format.

[Mattias Gustavsson]

I'm only using the XML as an intermediate format myself (and a custom binary one for the release).

However, I intentionally kept the bit which writes the XML very simple, so it should be very straightforward to replace it with something which suits your needs better - The whole XML writing thing is just this bit (with > and < replaced with ] and [ just to be able to post it here):

[RampantCoyote]

Now THAT is an awesome, useful, general-purpose tool. I'm sure there are others like it (I think I used to have one a long time ago), but I don't remember seeing one that is so flexible.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Mattias Gustavsson]

Thanks :-)

Yeah, there's a few similar tools out there (bmfont is one), but most of them doesn't give out the source code (and definitely not public domain), and I haven't found one which puts all the characters on a single horizontal strip, which is what I needed... also, quite often tools like this have poor, if any, antialias, or doesn't support kerning, or something else I don't like about it :P
_________________
www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[DeveloperX]

BAD ASS!
Very cool Mattias!
_________________
Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

See my professional portfolio

[RampantCoyote]

Maybe it was bmfont that I used before.

Well, whatevah.

You rock.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Hajo]

Cool tool :) This is definitely very useful. Thank you for making this!

[df]

If you had asked, I could have supplied ;) I have one for my roguelike, It uses SDL_TTF and dumps to a png file the first 256 characters as a 16x16 grid.