FontPacker - Pack TrueType fonts into your game

[davedes]

Does gdx-freetype support supersampling? If not, is there any freetype2 docs on it? I'd like to add it to my own tool.

[SHC]

@Sammidysam

Can you test the new beta 2? The binaries are here. I've updated to .Net Framework 3 to access the new font related classes.

[SHC]

@davades

I don't know of libGDX. I'm not using it.

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[Sammidysam]

Window ran fine again.  Last time I actually didn't test exporting the font which I really should have done.  Sorry.  This time I did, and I got a weird error.  I also got an exported file, however.  The error and the exported file are in the Pastebin links below.

The Error: http://pastebin.com/DDBeWEJ0
The Export: http://paste.fedoraproject.org/27922/78384137

I'll keep the file until you review the error, as Fedora's Pastebin does not have a never expire option.     But calling "cat blah | fpaste" to upload makes it worth it.

[Nate]

Does gdx-freetype support supersampling? If not, is there any freetype2 docs on it? I'd like to add it to my own tool.

Cool, I'll link your tool and the OP's tool on the wiki. Any chance you want to take over Hiero? For supersampling, render at a high resolution, then scale down. You can change the high resolution and how you sample when scaling down as a way to get varying levels of antialiasing.

[SHC]

@Sammidysam

That exception is thrown by Mono itself. It failed to display the message box. The font file is fully generated and worked for me when tested. Can you say what version of mono you have? It's running fine on Mono 2.8 for windows.

Can you try to export in the previous version?

[SHC]

@Nate

Thanks for adding this tool to your wiki. But you've written "The FontPacker tool uses Java's font rendering." which is incorrect. It uses the .Net Framework's classes

TextRenderer

,

FontFamily

and

Graphics

classes. The project is written in C#.

[SHC]

@Sammidysam

These lines in the error you've posted

================================================================= Got a SIGABRT while executing native code. This usually indicates a fatal error in the mono runtime or one of the native libraries used by your application. =================================================================

Shows that there's an error in your mono installation probably. Could you reinstall mono and try again?

[Nate]

Oops! Sorry, it slipped my mind that it was .NET. Fixing!

[SHC]

Hurray! It's finally rendering italic fonts perfectly! Here's the screenshot



I'll upload this version after testing with other fonts.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Sammidysam]

My Mono version is 2.10.8, as listed here.  It could be that my version is too old or that I do not have a Mono package installed that manages these fonts.  I'm not sure which one it could be though.  I have a lot of available mono packages.  They are here.  I'd rather not install them all if I don't need them, so are there any you want me to try to install and see if they make it work?

[SHC]

@Sammidysam

Probably mono cannot create messagebox from background worker. Moved the messagebox outside the background thread in the new beta 3. The link is FontPackerBeta3.zip

If you get that error again, reopen the application and test the generated font file.

Thanks for testing. I'll change the main post tomorrow morning.

[Sammidysam]

The error is now gone and it works completely fine.

[SHC]

@Sammidysam

It's because mono can only create controls or dialogs only on the starting thread. Glad it's working fine. Thanks for testing.

[SHC]

Could anybody recommend me of an opensource licence for this?

I'd like this tool to be used even in commercial apps for free.

[SHC]

I've licenced it with LGPL v3. Also written a Readme for GitHub. See the changes.

[kpars]

Use the GNU General Public License v3.

[SHC]

I had rewritten FontTester in Swing. Here's the screen shot.

[SHC]

Could anyone point me on a tutorial on how to pack bitmaps into texture atlases? I don't want to load another library (like apache commons codec) to decode the images.

[davedes]

Simple algorithm for rectangle packing:
http://www.blackpawn.com/texts/lightmaps/

[Herjan]

So, can I use this with LibGDX, or not? An XML file oO?

[SHC]

@Herjan

You can for sure use this with libGDX. Download the source from GitHub and compile the

JFontPack

library. It requires

Apache Commons Codec

in your classpath to compile and run. Then you can use it like

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8

// Construct a PackedFont PackedFont font = new PackedFont("MyPackedFont.fntpack"); // Get the glyph for a character i.e., the character to render on screen. java.awt.Image glyph = font.getGlyph('A'); // After rendering, move the x-coordinate by the advance width of that char. xpos += font.getAdvanceWidth('A');

The only requirements are that you need to convert the

java.awt.Image

to an OpenGL 2D texture and include Apache Commons Codec.

[SHC]

@Herjan

You can use these fonts without any other dependancies. See the article Using FontPacker with libGdx

[SHC]

Now also exports in BMFont text format. Here's the new screenshot.



I'll update the source and binaries shortly.

[SHC]

I'm currently testing it on Mac OSX. Here are the screenshots.

In MONO 3.2.3



In WINE with Microsoft's .NET 4.5



I don't know why the preview pane is not working in WINE version (But FontTester is working).

[Drenius]

What about adding the ability to add your own .ttf files?