Font Converter is a Windows program which allows convenient converting of any PC installed font into an emWin (bitmap) font that can be easily integrated into emWin based applications. It automatically displays the Font generation options dialog box and it allows you to select the output font and the Unicode format. Making your Bitmap logo is easy with BrandCrowd Logo Maker. Create a professional bitmap logo in minutes with our free bitmap logo maker. BrandCrowd logo maker is easy to use and allows you full customization to get the bitmap logo you want! Adjust your font globally. Use the slider bars to change elements of your font on the fly. You’ll instantly see the changes, thanks to the magic of parametrics, so you can make your perfect font, fast. BitFontCreator is a professional bitmap font creator tool for your embedded project, which helps you create monochrome (1-bpp) bitmap fonts and antialiased (2-bpp and 4-bpp) bitmap fonts for graphical LCD / LED. It just import the font installed on your Windows PC and create a C file representing that font.
Bitmap fonts are a great way to customize your novel's look and feel, but they can be quite tedious to produce manually.
Luckily there is a very good tool that makes it fast and easy and it's called Bitmap Font Generator, by Andreas Jönsson (www.AngelCode.com). The tool can generate a bitmap font in a format that Novelty is capable of importing.
BFG is included with Novelty, but if you want to get the latest version, read tutorials or just pay tribute to the developer you can visit the official site.
Using the Bitmap Font Generator
BFG is very easy to use. You select a font that's on your computer and tweak the settings to fit your needs. In the case of unicode fonts you can pick which languages to include. The tool then generates the font as one or more texture-files and an FNT-file. The FTN-file holds all the information Novelty needs to find the characters in the textures.
Click Options->Font settings or press F to pick a font.
Most of the settings in this dialog are self-explanatory. If you want your font to include letters and signs from non-latin languages make sure to set the Charset to Unicode.
If you click Options->Expert options or press T you get treated to even more settings.
There are a couple of things here that you need to consider:
First and foremost you need to make sure that the Font descriptor is set to XML, as it's the only format that Novelty can interpret. You also need to make sure that the Bit depth is set to 32 or else your font won't have any transparency.
As for the texture size it depends on the size of the font. If the font can't fit within a texture, additional texture files will be generated. 512x512 is the recommended size.
To preview the font texture(s), click Options->Visualize
When you're happy with how it looks, save your font.
Once you've generated the texture(s) and FNT-file, you chould bring up Novelty. In the File-menu, select Import assets->Bitmap fonts...
This will bring up the bitmap font import wizard. Click Load font... and navigate to the FNT-file you just generated. Once that's done, you have the option to change the name and add a filter. Then click Import. This will copy the font XML and the texture(s) to Novelty's asset library.
That's it. You should be ready to go. If you want, you can also save it as a package. The font will then be compressed to a single file that can be easily shared with friends.
Posted: 17 Mar 2015 at 00:08 by CodeheadOne of the big problems OpenGL runs into after you’ve got your first few polygons flying around the screen is the lack of a standard method for generating text within the API.
A few techniques have evolved to tackle the problem:
Pre-generated string textures
The simplest and fastest method, a texture is pre-built for each piece of text that needs to be displayed. This is quick to render at run time, but isn’t very flexible or efficient.
Polygon glyphs created from outline font definitions
This method produces high quality, scalable text, but this is also the slowest approach due to the overhead of generating and rendering the glyph polygons.
WGL and GLUT extensions
These extensions do a great job of text rendering. However, these libraries are not universally available on all systems and I have a bad habit of trying to be portable and platform independent.
Bitmapped fonts
Bitmap fonts are fast, flexible and platform independent. However, there are some limitations: Quality suffers when scaling up the texture and the number of possible characters in a font bitmap is limited. Extended or Unicode character sets with accents or non-latin symbols are not well supported.
A bitmapped font is simply an atlas texture containing a collection of glyphs and symbols. (Note: the purple lines are a visual aid, they do not appear on the actual texture.)
The grid layout means that the calculation required to select any given character is quick and simple.
The area containing the selected characters can then be mapped onto a series of polygons to create dynamic strings of text.
Adding width information to the glyphs allows the textured quads to be overlapped to create better looking text with variable character widths.
There are quite a few bitmap font generators around, but I couldn’t find one that provided all the features I wanted. So I wrote my own.
Codehead’s Bitmap Font Generator (CBFG) is now at version 1.45 and supports the following features:
- DIB rendering of font gives best font output, regardless of users screen settings
- Global or per character position and width adjustment
- Texture Sizes from 16×16 up to 4096×4096
- Zoom up to 400% for accurate tweaking of character positions
- Anti-aliasing or ClearType (XP+) for smoother looking fonts
- Control of font width
- Font preview option
- TGA export option
- BMP output option
- BFF output in 8, 24 and 32bit colour depths
- C++ example source code for loading and rendering BFF files
- Binary font data export
- Font info dump option
- User configurable colours and startup parameters
Many people have made useful suggestions that have been implemented in CBFG, and the tool has been used on the following projects:
- Floating Sandbox A 2D Physics Simulator developed by Gabriele Giuseppini.
- Beginning Android Games An APress book by Robert Green and Mario Zechner
- SkaPong by Einar
- SF2DBmpFont a font loader for 3DS homebrew by Flarn2006
- ByVac’s [BV4629] Touchscreen LCD
Downloads
CBFG Packages
Windows Installer Package
Files only zip
Source Code
CBFG has been open sourced under the BSD licence. You can get v1.45 on GitHub
BFF Loading Code
C/C++ - included in zip/installer.
Android by Codehead
O’Caml by Einar (local mirror)
SF2DBmpFont a font loader for SF2DLib by Flarn2006
Bitmap Font Generator
The Future
CBFG hasn’t been in active development for a few years now, but there are still a few features I always wanted to add:
ToDo List
- State save option
- Merge/Extract font image
Wish List
- Export in other font generator formats
- Edit font image
- Unicode support
Known Issues
Windows Bitmap Font
Cleartype system setting can override antialias settings in application.