Font Creator

[EvilDragon]

Well, some of you may know, there has been a font creator released at the GBAX 2004 competition.

There are Windows Editors to create the fonts and already a viewer to look at the fonts using your GP32.

The author plans to release the sources for viewing the fonts.

Isn't that of great use for game engines like Gigas or Zot!?

If it's easy to include (it should, when the source is available), everybody can create own fonts for his games

 

[jlebrech]

Maybe some cool text games can be made from this, chatboard support or not.

 

[skeezix]

Depends what sort of fontsd and such .. ie: Does it load up and rasterize TTF vector fonts? Or just bitmap fonts? If bitmap fonts, I'm not too concerned, since in Zot you just tell it to load up an image file and the spacing between characters and you've got a font ready to use in your zot stuff But theres a few interesting font formats out on the net, so a handy parser for them coudl be handy.

jeff

 

[EvilDragon]

I didn't look at it very deeply yet, skeezix, but as it's a GBAX submission, you could take a look for yourself (or wait till I get home and can look at my gp32 )

 

[Pirotic]

Gigas will just support bitmap fonts when done, so it'd be pretty easy to make your own thanks for the idea tho

 

[EvilDragon]

Ah, okay
It's pretty neat that you can create your own fonts
Yeeha

 

[Oankali]

Hi, I'm Oankali, the programmer of OKF Font File Format.

I wanted to say that the fonts are bitmap fonts and not vectorial. At the beginning I wanted to work directly with TrueType fonts and managed to port FreeType 2.0 to the gp32. If anybody is interested I can send him the demo .fxe I made to try it.
The problem was that some TrueType fonts are really big. But the main problem was that it's very difficult to make fancy fonts with this system as you have to make all the calculations in real time as does PhotoShop.
My goal was to prepare a new font format for the GP32. A format flexible enough to be used in most of the programs you can so for the GP32.
GPFontMaker is not really a font editor. It takes a TrueType font, export it to 1 or 2 bitmaps depending on if you want to include a mask, and then takes the post-processed bitmap(s) to generate an OKF Font.
Actually GPFontMaker only generates 16bits fonts but the format it designed to accept 8bit fonts. Also the OKF Font Engine I have programmed only uses 16bits fonts as this mode is a lot more versatile when it comes to render the mask included in the fonts.

If you read the license, you will see that the main idea is to have a font format that all the designers and programmers could share without restrictions.
This way, designers can prepare some really nice fonts for the programmers without having to bother of the way to present them.
Any OKF Font is free and can be used by everybody. Just be careful in not using copyrighted TTF for commercial use.
Tell me what you think about the system and if you think it can be useful for the GP32 community.
Check the OKF Font Tester and its embedded fonts. For me, font number 8 it's the nicest one. Try the Font Toolbox and all it's options on it, and look at its properties to see what's in the font file (look at OKF_SPEC.TXT for the complete specification).

I hope you will find the system useful as I have spend a lot of time designing and developing it.
Actually I'm documenting all the font engine, very soon I will release the sources and if you prefer a precompiled library.

Oankali

 

[EvilDragon]

Oh, great
So you actually can use TTFs (converted) for your GP32

BTW: Nice avatar

 

[Oankali]

Yes, in fact all fonts in OKF Font Tester are common TT fonts.

 

[kknd_cf]

Ah, okay
It's pretty neat that you can create your own fonts
Yeeha

even more customisation....

 

[Pirotic]

i'll try to get custom fonts in for the next release, the native GP32 one is pig ugly.