Bitmap Font Generator Online

| Posted on by



Posted: 17 Mar 2015 at 00:08 by Codehead

SVG Bitmap Font Generator. Takes SVG fonts and converts them to the BitmapFont format used by Starling. Depends on the svg library for drawing shapes. Depends on OpenFL for rendering to bitmap. Download free bitmap font, view its character map and generate text-based images or logos with bitmap font online.

One of the big problems OpenGL runs into after you’ve got your first few polygons flying around the screen is the lack of a standard method for generating text within the API.

  • Font Converter is a Windows program which allows convenient converting of any PC installed font into an emWin (bitmap) font that can be easily integrated into emWin based applications. It automatically displays the Font generation options dialog box and it allows you to select the output font and the Unicode format.
  • The Bitmap Font Generator is a free program to generate bitmap fonts from true type fonts. The bitmaps are generated in such a way as to leave as little unused space as possible. Position of the characters in the bitmap is not regular so you'll need the generated font.
  • The Bitmap Font Generator is a free program to generate bitmap fonts from true type fonts. The bitmaps are generated in such a way as to leave as little unused space as possible. Position of the characters in the bitmap is not regular so you'll need the generated font descriptor file to determine how to draw each character.

A few techniques have evolved to tackle the problem:

Pre-generated string textures

The simplest and fastest method, a texture is pre-built for each piece of text that needs to be displayed. This is quick to render at run time, but isn’t very flexible or efficient.

Polygon glyphs created from outline font definitions

This method produces high quality, scalable text, but this is also the slowest approach due to the overhead of generating and rendering the glyph polygons.

WGL and GLUT extensions

Bitmap Font Generator Online

These extensions do a great job of text rendering. However, these libraries are not universally available on all systems and I have a bad habit of trying to be portable and platform independent.

Bitmapped fonts

Bitmap fonts are fast, flexible and platform independent. However, there are some limitations: Quality suffers when scaling up the texture and the number of possible characters in a font bitmap is limited. Extended or Unicode character sets with accents or non-latin symbols are not well supported.

A bitmapped font is simply an atlas texture containing a collection of glyphs and symbols. (Note: the purple lines are a visual aid, they do not appear on the actual texture.)

The grid layout means that the calculation required to select any given character is quick and simple.

The area containing the selected characters can then be mapped onto a series of polygons to create dynamic strings of text.

Adding width information to the glyphs allows the textured quads to be overlapped to create better looking text with variable character widths.

There are quite a few bitmap font generators around, but I couldn’t find one that provided all the features I wanted. So I wrote my own.

Codehead’s Bitmap Font Generator (CBFG) is now at version 1.45 and supports the following features:

  • DIB rendering of font gives best font output, regardless of users screen settings
  • Global or per character position and width adjustment
  • Texture Sizes from 16×16 up to 4096×4096
  • Zoom up to 400% for accurate tweaking of character positions
  • Anti-aliasing or ClearType (XP+) for smoother looking fonts
  • Control of font width
  • Font preview option
  • TGA export option
  • BMP output option
  • BFF output in 8, 24 and 32bit colour depths
  • C++ example source code for loading and rendering BFF files
  • Binary font data export
  • Font info dump option
  • User configurable colours and startup parameters

Many people have made useful suggestions that have been implemented in CBFG, and the tool has been used on the following projects:

  • Floating Sandbox A 2D Physics Simulator developed by Gabriele Giuseppini.
  • Beginning Android Games An APress book by Robert Green and Mario Zechner
  • SkaPong by Einar
  • SF2DBmpFont a font loader for 3DS homebrew by Flarn2006
  • ByVac’s [BV4629] Touchscreen LCD

Downloads

CBFG Packages

Windows Installer Package

Files only zip

Source Code

CBFG has been open sourced under the BSD licence. You can get v1.45 on GitHub

BFF Loading Code

C/C++ - included in zip/installer.

Android by Codehead

O’Caml by Einar (local mirror)

SF2DBmpFont a font loader for SF2DLib by Flarn2006

The Future

CBFG hasn’t been in active development for a few years now, but there are still a few features I always wanted to add:

ToDo List

  • State save option
  • Merge/Extract font image

Wish List

  • Export in other font generator formats
  • Edit font image
  • Unicode support

Known Issues

Cleartype system setting can override antialias settings in application.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

( Depends of Editon : BASIC , STANDARD ( full software) orExtended
Native easy to install Windows software application
GRAPHIC EDITOR AND COLOR DEPTH CONVERTER for
Monochrome GLCD
2,4,5 * and 16 bpp grayscale (2,16,32 and 256 gray shades) GLCD
16 Colors (4bpp) GLCD
4096 Colors (12bpp * ) GLCD
252k (18bpp * ) GLCD
* packed and unpacked data
Dot matrix sizes up to 1024 x 768, supports BMP,JPEG,PNG,ICO,TIFF,GIF animation
HTML5

Free Type In Font Generator

Bitmap
COLOR TO BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION
Easy conversion of color images to black/white with treshold level trackbar slider or Dithering
See full list on angelcode.com
Floyd Steinberg , Nearest, Stucki, Sierra, JaJuNi, Steve Arche, Burkes
EXTENDED EDITION
Font Gen : Font specific Kerning pairs Table export to code
Font Gen : Selectable international ANSI Codepage
Font Gen : Under Dev > Import Lists of Chars from an Excel Table (Widechars)


GLCD.c Library Vector Design and Programming [LINK]

DATA ARRAYS AS OUTPUT AND AS INPUT (input > monochrome)
Generate GLCD Data arrays full screen, part of screen, screen subdivision
Data to text file, Intel Hex File, Binary File, 8,16 and 32 bit format
GLCD DATA COMPRESSION (monochrome only) [LINK]
Imports Data Arrays of source files and convert data to bitmap inside the Work Canvas (monochrome only) [LINK]
GLCD FONTS

CodeMasters

GLCD Font Editor / Creator / Generator , Import and convert system fonts, edit and generate system or Editable fonts (<= 256 colors), create fonts from scratch

16 Bit Font Generator


Bitmap Font Generator Online
Easy graphical Touch Panel / Touch Screen regions programming (resolution 8,10 or 12, 16 and 24 bit ) [LINK]

8 Bit Text Generator

SERIAL COM
Serial Communication Terminal ( Virtual Comport, USB to RS232 )


Easy settings for output of data array for C , Pascal, Basic or assembler codes, the development tool you use for your favorite embedded system. Whole Animation is converted to GLCD data in one single run.


Automatic Text Search and Replace , Text and Graphic Batch Processing features ...

Online Bitmap Font Generator Trend: Fancy Bitmap Font ...

Monochrome, Grayscale, Color