Creating bitmap fonts for GAL
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Maciej Suminski <maciej.suminski@cern.ch>
12.04.2016
To create a new bitmap font atlas for Graphics Abstraction Layer, follow these steps:
* Download Bitmap Font Generator [1] (runs well under wine)
* Load default configuration stored in font.bmfc
* Adjust settings as needed
* Be sure that all glyphs fit into one page (you can check if in 'Visualize' you can move to another page (menu View))
* Export font atlas as .PNG file, and font description as XML file
* Run ./fnt2struct.py bitmap_font.fnt
* Run ./png2struct.py bitmap_font_0.png
* Copy bitmap_font_desc.c to common/gal/opengl/bitmap_font_desc.c
* Copy bitmap_font_0.png to common/gal/opengl/bitmap_font_img.c
Recommended export options:
Texture size: 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 (should be supported by majority GPUs)
Bit depth: 8
Font descriptor: XML
Textures: png
Layout spacing: 2 (both horizontal and vertical)
To match as closely as possible the newstroke_font glyph set,
mark the following character subsets in Bitmap Font Generator right panel:
Latin + Latin Supplement
Latin Extended A
Latin Extended B
IPA Extensions
Greek and Coptic
Cyrillic
Latin Extended Additional
Greek Extended
General Punctuation
Subscripts and Superscripts
Currency Symbols
Number Forms
Mathematical Operators
Geometric Shapes
References:
1. http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
