I need help getting started with the bitmap font plugin.

H everyone,

I'm going to use the bitmap font plugin in my game project but am intimimidated by the process of creating the indifidual letter images. Doesn anyone know of a program that could help in this reguard with a 24 bit image? Anyone know of other useful resources for bitmap fonts. Anyone have an actual string of text in propper ascii ordre that I can copy and paste into photoshop to make my font?

thanks

I've made a few from Dafont.

http://guicon.110mb.com/structure/index.php?act=page&id=4

If there is a particular font you want mapped out leave a link I'll see what I can do.

I really apreciate the offer and I might take you up on it... but I 'd love to know of a simple process to take a truetype font, type out all the charactures you need, edit them where necessary, then save them out into all the properly spaced and positioned individual letters...

Well actually there really is no simple process. You can google around for the actual order characters are mapped to, that's no problem. But unless you want to type them all out, some sort of script, or automation process is necessary. Personally I use Gimp, with a py-fu script that I modified.

I could give you the script, but the funny thing is you have to install three other things besides python just to get it to work.

You might check around there's probably a php service out there that uses the gd libraries or something similar.

Hello again. I've found a nice, free tool for converting a Truetype font to a bitmap font (it doesnt support alpha, but I then quickly convert it to an alpha blended font in photoshop so that doesnt bother me) It's called Codehead's Bitmap font generator.

However, I need to know an easy way to set each font character's spacing based on the with of that actual frame. I hope I dont have to manually select and type in the width of every last character

I tried to use a loop to do it but there doesnt seem to be a way to select the letter character in the font by any means other than the drop down selector. Can't we select them in sequential order numerically some how?

thanks

Yep that's one of the issues with variable width fonts. You can either set the width manually, or change the x,y offsets within spritefont... that is as long as nothing gets cropped off on import.

Or change the font type...

http://www.dafont.com/bitmap.php

and what about french specfic characters. I can't even acess them to set their width?

Hi,

maybe this is of any help. I was also looking for such a tool and found this one, which seems to fullfill all requests you have to it. It is not free (15$) but there is a 30-day-trial version, so it may help on your current project at least. I did not use it yet because I am still working on graphics and art concept and don't want to waste the 30 days, so I cannot report my own experiences.

Should you (or anybody else) discover another (freeware) tool, I would be happy to see a link posted here.

Link to "Fontrast"-Website:

http://hexforge.com/fontrast.shtml

Hello again. I've found a nice, free tool for converting a Truetype font to a bitmap font (it doesnt support alpha, but I then quickly convert it to an alpha blended font in photoshop so that doesnt bother me) It's called Codehead's Bitmap font generator.

However, I need to know an easy way to set each font character's spacing based on the with of that actual frame. I hope I dont have to manually select and type in the width of every last character

I tried to use a loop to do it but there doesnt seem to be a way to select the letter character in the font by any means other than the drop down selector. Can't we select them in sequential order numerically some how?

thanks

i thought i had responded to this one, so sorry about the super late reply,

the font width is set automatically to the width of the frame

so if youre saying that you dont want the plugin to do any spacing and you just want the spacing to be built into the actual frames with transparent areas or something, then just set the spacing for all to 0

Btw you can use negative #'s, and if you go to far it will reverse the output.

There ya go Lucid your first hidden feature.