By 2011-11-17 12:47:31 UTCThe is supported by, the easiest way to have an online meeting. Join.me lets you instantly share your screen with anyone, for free.
Use it to collaborate, demo, show off — the possibilities are endless.Though there are plenty of fonts out there for you to choose from (and many are even free), you may have the desire to create your very own custom font. Perhaps you want to design your own unique font for your company's logo, or you may have a specific font design in mind and, after looking at hundreds of fonts, you've concluded that you'd have to make your own lettering to get exactly what you want.Software for designing your own fonts (often called font editors) can be expensive, with, one of the industry's standards, fetching over $600. Though professional font foundries — which make a business designing and selling fonts — would be happy paying this high sticker price, the cost is prohibitively high for those of us who want to build simple fonts.What's great is there are several free font editors out there that you can use to create your own fonts.
If the character does not have a matching glyph in the current strike FontForge will create one by rasterizing the outline version of the font. Editing Bitmaps The bitmap editing window should be fairly self explanatory. The window is a simple bitmap editor. With the pencil tool, clicking on a pixel will make it change.
Below, you'll discover seven of the best free tools for designing fonts.With these tools, don't expect to create high quality professional fonts right from the start — it will take time and practice, just like with any endeavor. But, if you're simply looking to create a custom font or would like to try your hand at a fun, fulfilling and creative activity like font design, these tools will certainly help you get the job done.
7 Tools for Creating Your Own Fonts. Gdbfed is a free font-creation software that you can use to edit or create your own fonts. It has native support for BDF fonts and other lesser-known font file types, but - with a little trickery - it can export to the more popular OpenType font format, too.Beware, though, that the installation process of gbdfed can be cumbersome - it was created for Linux, requires to be installed and, for most computer users, will require the use of the command-line to compile the software. It's been tested on Mac OS and, in its current state, doesn't run well on Windows. Though there are many free font editors out there, we focused on those that are still actively maintained and those that we can comfortably recommend.
But if you're the adventurous type, do check out other free font editing software and projects such as, and.What font editor do you use? Let us know in the comments below.Series supported by join.meThe is supported by, the easiest way to have an online meeting. Named one of Time magazine’s best websites of 2011, join.me lets you share your screen so you can instantly get together, collaborate, demo, show off, and more. Plus, it’s totally free. How will you use it?.Topics:,.
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). There are many complicated and feature-rich tools out there but my favorite tool for building bitmap fonts is.
It's a simple tool which does one thing very well. It's clearly documented with tips for implementation.Like most bitmap font creators, it is of course graphics API independent because it simply exports an image (and an easy to read data structure). However, implementing your own text-rendering system, in OpenGL or Direct3D, is not too difficult-render a quad for each letter and apply the bitmap font texture with appropriate coordinates.I hope this helps!Note: This is a Win32 application only, but I still recommend it!
The last time I was looking for this (for an iPhone game), I tried various options but couldn't find one that did everything I wanted. I needed to render a single texture using very small characters from a commercial TTF font. I needed to be able to specify character ranges so it would only contain the characters I needed.
I wanted it to pack the glyphs as tightly as it could. I needed texture coordinates at runtime. I didn't care about 'real' kerning, but I needed glyph measurements at runtime so it would be spaced sensibly. So I wrote a small Windows app that rendered all the characters and saved out the ABC spacings (as reported by Windows) along with texture coordinates.BTW, if you want to render very small text (like less than 16 pixels high) under XP or Vista, you will run into shortcomings with Windows' anti-aliasing. An easy fix for me was to use to get transparent supersampling.
If I were starting over, I'd probably take the same approach but look at FreeType2 instead of native text rendering.If your text isn't updated often, you could just use the platform's text rendering (or maybe FreeType) to render whole chunks to texture as needed at runtime. Then you just need to render a single quad for each string, but the texture allocation gets more complicated. On the upside, though, you get flawless text rendering and layout for free on those difficult Asian languages along with your significantly faster GL code. Rendering lots of individual characters is expensive, even with degenerate tri strips or whatnot.