What tool do you use to convert ttf fonts to bitmap fonts?
Following is a list of features I'm looking for. I'd be happy with any tool really, but one that had these features would be better.
- outputs power-of-2 texture atlas
- parsible config file (so I don't have to use their rendering library)
- output kerning information
- cross platform
- a rendering library would be great if it lets me make the actual OpenGL calls.
So what tool have you used? Were you happy with it?
Answer
Font Builder
Font Builder does almost everything I need. Both Font Studio and Angel Code's BMFont and perform similar tasks. Here are some of Font Builders features.
- A QT app, and so works equally well on all platforms.
- Open source so it can easily extend the app if needed
- Designed to allow custom image and description(layout) exporters, making it even easier to extend
- Loads fonts from the filesystem instead of windows registry. This makes it a ton easier to generate texture fonts from my own TTFs.
- Auto sizes the final image so I don't need to guess( like in FontStudio). Further, these textures can be constrained to be power of 2 sizes.
- Kerning pairs are supported, so that info can be exported if your TTF uses them.
It's not all perfect however. The default layout plugins suck. The Box layout tool just fills the texture from top left to bottom right using the characters alphabetically. Not very efficient. I changed it to sort the characters by height first and quickly improved its efficiency (a 2 line change).
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