Fontmap Builder Released

[melvinator]

Fontmap Builder Released

Fontmap Builder is a tool for generating bitmap textures of your fonts for use in OpenGL applications. It generates textures from the printable glyphs in any Mac OS X compatible font and allows custom font and backgound colors as well as variable font sizing. Supported export image formats are JPEG, TIFF, and RAW.

For more information and the application see:

http://members.shaw.ca/murtad/

Hope others find this useful!

[skyhawk]

That is friggin awesome!!! but I wouldn't suggest making it shareware :???:

[kelvin]

Originally posted by skyhawk
That is friggin awesome!!! but I wouldn't suggest making it shareware :???: Especially cuz it's not all that difficult to make from scratch anyways.

[Carlos Camacho]

I don't agree... really. I made I think two font sets for OpenGL use. Took me a long time as I didn't take a coding approach but did it via PhotoShop.

[kelvin]

Originally posted by Camacho
I don't agree... really. I made I think two font sets for OpenGL use. Took me a long time as I didn't take a coding approach but did it via PhotoShop. I meant to make an application to create font sets. The CBFontTexture objects in CocoaBlitz took me about an hour to write and another hour integrate. Today I think I could do it in 1 hour total.

[arekkusu]

There's definitely a diminishing return on a tool like this. If you are going to use a whole lot of font sizes / colors / styles, you're probably better off just sticking the font in your bundle and generating all the layouts at runtime.

And if you're using standard system fonts, there's really no excuse to ever prerender a texture with a tool like this. Put the rendering code in your app.

[codemattic]

Originally posted by kelvin
Today I think I could do it in 1 hour total. .. and the guy is charging a reasonable $5 - your time is worth more than $5/hour right?

Of course if you write it yourself - you have the satisfaction of DIY and total control - blah blah blah... that said I wrote a very similar utility found here <http://www.idevgames.com/content/download.php?id=397> which took me considerably more than an hour to write.

melvinator - Fontmap Builder looks good! The only thing you may want to add is to let the user decide the size of the grid - some devs may want to use something other than 16x16. But very nice job!

arekkusu - if you wanted your game to run in Mac/Windows/Linux you might want to avoid writing separate code to handle loading/drawing fonts on each system. I could see how a dev might want a single codebase that loads the font texture. Font textures are usually small and compress well anyhow.

[melvinator]

codemattic: Thanks. If I had known there was an app to do this I wouldn't have written it, I'll consider letting the user choose the grid size as well as the unicode range.

skyhawk: Thank you, I'm not asking for the world, actually I'm not really expecting people to register it. Maybe some will if they find it useful.