Bitmap Font Generator

[jdarling]

http://pngdelphi.sourceforge.net/
http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/
http://www.delphi-gems.com/GraphicEx.php

Its worth noting that GraphicEx is read only on PNG. Still, its one of the best graphic reading libraries out there for Delphi. Now if only the conversion for FPC/Lazarus was complete

PNGImage (pngdelphi.sourceforge.net) is one of the most stable that I've found.

[Nitrogen]

Yea, that's the one I've downloaded.

I hope I can integrate this with the font loader unit without bloating it too much...

[Chebmaster]

1. A nice thing, but useless for us, Russians.
2. Clicking the "Characters" button raises an Access Violation

[Nitrogen]

Yea, because there's no Unicode support..

Might be why the character setup is messing up too.

[Chebmaster]

Well, on my machine it obviously *does* use the Cyrillic character set (at least the exotic part of it are visible, corresponding to Serbian, AFAIK), so if it just allowed to choose which characters of the ANSI set to use, that would do.

But what the crashy button "Characters" should normally do?

[Nitrogen]

It opens up a window which shows all the characters nicely in a list so you can choose the starting and ending characters. But you can still type in the manual numbers if you want.

I've fixed the bug, but I'm busy adding TGA support before I release it again. PNGs carry too much extra baggage that needs to be installed before you can use them, and TGA files are very easy to load.

[JSoftware]

I like it. I'm writing a wrapper though as your code doesn't really fit well into resolution indepent positioning and scaling wise.

The tool is polished and it just works smoothly(except for the Characters button). TGA format output in your own fileformat could be fine though to eliminate the need for the jpeg unit(and all the rtl graphics units)

Don't you forget to set the length of the F array to 0 when your TFontObj object is getting freed?

[Nitrogen]

Possibly, but then F is a defined member of the TFontObj class, surely the class destructor knows enough to free all it's member variables?

If F was a pointer to a dynamically allocated array, then yes, it would create a memory leak.

[Chesso]

Hi, I'm going to try this out soon, so I'm not entirely sure how much use it is to me, but would the output be fine for use in UnDelphiX's TPowerFont?

I was going to make my own from scratch but it sounds like this tool will make the job easier (and it does JPEG, as UnDelphiX doesn't support PNG's yet).

[Nitrogen]

I've never used UnDelphiX, so I really cant say.

All this program does is give you a texture and list of characters with their Left,Top,Right,Bottom coordinates, and some spacing information, how you use it is up to you. You can have a look at the Font2.pas unit in the Font Test project to see how to load the files..

I'm busy with an update to the program.. Adding Unicode support is looking to be a huge pain in the ass, but I have got proper character spacings now, and not relying on the Canvas.TextWidth() function. The Characters button has been redone, and now shows all 65000 unicode characters, but I'm not happy with the way it does this. The main window is able to render unicode now, but the font rendering technique still has to become multibyte-character-aware.