Thread: Creating fonts in Configurator

wow.....I'm stumped.

How have others gotten this to work? I know you guys have sold quite a few of these things. How is everyone else using it? Are we the only ones with this problem? Has everyone else been able to figure it out or what?

I made 2 fonts yesterday using the configurator. Make sure you are saving the png with an alpha channel. There needs to be a column of 0/0/0/0 in A/R/G/B. I attached my PSD file for the Verdana font. Just edit the Font and save as a png and use that if you cant get it. All the channels and spacing are correct I know for sure.

Ok, I just changed the way the font creator works. Now you can use blue if you want for the background. It will look at pixel 0,0 and use that as a compare colour. So if you cant get your alpha channel the correct colour, it will not matter. I tried to new one with your image Red and it found all the characters. It still needs a full column of that comparative colour per font-height pixels to seperate the characters, but now it will be easier.

Also just as a heads up to you guys with black letters, you really should be using white letters. That way you can change the font colour with the program. White + Colour = Colour. Black + Colour = Black. So if you make black font, it will be black forever.

And:

Originally Posted by Dan2008

So what you are doing is creating a map for each character in the image file and when it comes time to display a character, you are cropping X,Y pixels at position A,B pixels. Smart!

That is exactly what it is doing. If you look at the xml, you will see each character is just a 2 points with the 2 corners surrounding the image making the rectangle to crop for every character. I think it is a standard way of doing bitmap fonts, but I just made it up as I went and learned later that it is actually common to do it. But the font parser from the image is pretty unique I think. I havent seen anything else able to do it.

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

Ok, I just changed the way the font creator works. Now you can use blue if you want for the background. It will look at pixel 0,0 and use that as a compare colour. So if you cant get your alpha channel the correct colour, it will not matter. I tried to new one with your image Red and it found all the characters. It still needs a full column of that comparative colour per font-height pixels to seperate the characters, but now it will be easier.

Will the updater pick it up or do we need to download it?

Also just as a heads up to you guys with black letters, you really should be using white letters. That way you can change the font colour with the program. White + Colour = Colour. Black + Colour = Black. So if you make black font, it will be black forever.

Been making (or trying) mine white since learning this a while back.

That is exactly what it is doing. If you look at the xml, you will see each character is just a 2 points with the 2 corners surrounding the image making the rectangle to crop for every character. I think it is a standard way of doing bitmap fonts, but I just made it up as I went and learned later that it is actually common to do it. But the font parser from the image is pretty unique I think. I havent seen anything else able to do it.

I hate to break your bubble but "screen scrapers" have been around for about 25 years in the mainframe world. I've never seen a manual screen scraper though. They are used to gather data from one program for input into another where the two programs are incompatible (that happens a lot in mainframe software).

Can the process be reversed? What I mean is for the user to enter characters and have the software create the image file. If so, this would be a great improvement to flexibility.

Originally Posted by Dan2008

Will the updater pick it up or do we need to download it?

Perhaps someone can outline to me the steps I need to take to make an alpha channel.

It appears that a good amount of Photo Shop knowledge is required for this...heck, it appears that you must have photo shop to even be able to do this, no?

Any graphics program that can create a PNG file with an alpha channel will work.

I would like to have a step-by-step as well.

Again...why not just use True Type fonts and forget about all of the complications this adds?

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

I made 2 fonts yesterday using the configurator. Make sure you are saving the png with an alpha channel. There needs to be a column of 0/0/0/0 in A/R/G/B. I attached my PSD file for the Verdana font. Just edit the Font and save as a png and use that if you cant get it. All the channels and spacing are correct I know for sure.

I tried using the same one you uploaded here...only changing the font to Arial.

It only finds 64 of the 71 characters....

Did it find all 71 for you?

If I use the font you had initially, it finds all 71.