Bitmap Font Maker
Bitmap Font Generator Windows 7
Bitmap Font Tool

In version 2.0 of the ProFont distribution, Carl provided an ISOLatin1 encoded version of ProFont. The shapes of several of the characters have been modified for improved readability, and a 7 pt bitmap version of ProFont is included. In version 2.2 of the ProFont distribution, Carl produced a version of ProFont that uses the Windows character set. Font Meme is a fonts & typography resource. The 'Fonts in Use' section features posts about fonts used in logos, films, TV shows, video games, books and more; The 'Text Generator' section features simple tools that let you create graphics with fonts of different styles as well as various text effects. Bitmap font generator This program will allow you to generate bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts. The application generates both image files and character descriptions that can be read by a game for easy rendering of fonts.

Known issues

Rotated characters

Some font files have some but not all subsets with characters rotated by 90 degrees. Parallels desktop 9 download free. full version. For example @Arial Unicode MS, with subset Enclosed Alphanumerics. This is not an error, but a feature of that font file. With the font rotated like this it permits writing texts in normal text editors as if they were in vertical lines.

There is a small online bitmap font generator tool written in AS3. Fonts can be used with EZGUI or NGUI. Hope it would be useful for windows users, who can not try such great tools like bmGlyph and Glyph Designer. I have a question concerning Bitmap fonts. I need to create fonts for screen device. It should consists of bitmaps of all printable characters. To get a bitmaps of all characters I am using the fol.

As of version 1.13 the rotated fonts are no longer displayed in the font selection list.

Large bitmap fonts switch to Arial

Bitmap Font Maker

Some bitmap fonts, e.g. FixedSys, may switch to Arial when generating very large fonts. This is a side effect ofBMFont using GDI for rasterizing the fonts. As GDI doesn't support rendering these bitmap fonts at very large sizes it automatically switches to the default TrueType font, Arial, instead.

When executing BMFont from the command line the application returns before completing

This happens because BMFont is a GUI application and Windows automatically returns the control to the console after initiating the application. A console application, bmfont.com, has been created to allow the execution of thetool from the command line without immediate return to the console.

The bitmap font is generated with incorrect kerning pairs

For some TrueType fonts the kerning pairs that are saved into the bitmap font is obviously wrong, e.g. with duplicate entries, or offsets that are really large. This is usually a problem with the TrueType font itself, and not a bug in BMFont, as BMFont simply saves the kerning pairs it extracts from the TrueType font.

BMFont provides an option to skip the kerning pairs when saving the bitmap font, which can be used when they are defunct and unusable.

Cropped character glyphs

When rendering the bitmap font using the Windows native font renderer, some TrueType fonts present cropped glyphs. This happenswhen the TrueType font has glyphs that go above or below the fonts cell height.

To work around this, render the font from the TrueType outline instead.

This program will allow you to generate bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts. The application generates both image files and character descriptions that can be read by a game for easy rendering of fonts.

The program is freeware and open source, but a donation is greatly appreciated.

If you don't have an image viewer capable of reading TGA, PNG, or DDS files, I recommend PUPP, another free product from AngelCode.

Downloads

Features

Support for complete Unicode 13.0 character set, as well as 8 bit OEM character sets
Optimal use of texture space, i.e. as little unused area as possible
Support for kerning pairs
Easy to use file format, either normal text file or xml files. Binary format is available for those that prefer that
8bit or 32bit texture output (TGA, PNG, and DDS files)
Option for packing 4 layers of font images into 1 32bit texture. Needs special shader to render with, but saves a lot of memory
Anti-aliasing, both through Windows native font smoothing and super sampling
Configurable padding and spacing between characters
Select characters from text file, supports both UTF8 and UTF16 encoded files
Generate bitmap font from command line
Import colored images as characters, supports: bmp, jpg, tga, dds, png
Optional outline to font characters
Optional packing of characters with outline into 1 channel. Needs special shader to unpack during rendering, but saves a lot of memory
Use TrueType fonts directly from the file without installing them first
Autofit font size for target texture size

Documentation

The manual is included with the tool, but for those who wish to take a look at it without installing the tool first it is also available here. The manual describes bothhow to use the tool and the file format of the generated files.

Source code

The source code is available under the widely known zlib license. The svn repositoryis hosted at SourceForge.net

Get the code by pointing your svn client at: http://svn.code.sf.net/p/bmfont/code/trunk.

If you want any support with the code, then please visit the forums.

Observation on virus alert

Avira anti-virus has been known to give a virus alert when scanning bmfont.exe or the installer. This is a falsepositive generated by their heuristic functions that tries to predict and catch unknown viruses. I've already reportedthis false positive to Avira a few times and each time they recognize it as a false positive, however for some reasonthe problem comes back months later (presumably when they update the heuristic functions).

Bitmap Font Generator Windows 7

If anyone has any idea what I need to change in the code to prevent this false alert I would very much like to know.

Tutorials & Resources

Here are a some links to other resources that provide information or tools that are useful for those interested in bitmap fonts.

Bitmap Fonts by Andreas Jönsson
Bitmap Fonts by Chad Vernon
Quick tutorial: Variable width bitmap fonts by Promit
BMFont OpenGL Implementation by legolas558
bmfont BlitzMax module by Mike Wiering
C# XML serializer for font loading by DeadlyDan
C# XML BMFont reader by Antoine Guilbaud
BMFont to C source code converter by Lars Ole Pontoppidan
PlayOnLinux - can be used to run BMFont on Linux
GlyphCombiner - a Mac OS X tool by Binary Blobs for combining multiple bitmap fonts into a single atlas

The following are some other tools that also generate output in the same format that I came up with for BMFont and that is widely usedin the industry today.

Littera - free web application
Glyph Designer - paid app for Mac
ShoeBox - free tool written with Adobe Air
Hiero - open source tool written in Java

Changes

1.14 - 2021/01/05
- Fixed crash with large fonts when Windows API incorrectly reported negative width for glyphs.
- Improved handling of out-of-memory conditions.
- Fixed crash that could occur when exporting unicode characters above 0x10000 with kerning pairs.
- Fixed crash when command line argument -c was a relative path and the configuration included font file or image files.
- Fixed crash when saving configuration file with added font file from the same directory.
- Corrected the cell height when using fixed height and supersampling.
- Fixed compatibility with Windows XP.
- Fixed scaling issues and cropping when using height scale with render from outline.
- Fixed application freeze when generating very large fonts.