Font Studio 4.02 is here!

[Nitrogen]

Three reasons:

- It uses 3rd party controls that makes it a hassle to distribute with the source code, and makes it not easily compilable

- The code is not commented or documented so it's not really good as a teaching aid

- I've spent quite a lot of effort on it, and although I'm not going to ask money for it, I'd still like to keep control over my intellectual property.

[Sly]

ClearType is never a good option for creating smoothed bitmap fonts because ClearType uses sub-pixel rendering based on the contents of the buffer you are rendering the character to. The end result is that you get blue and red fringes on the left and right edges of the characters.

See if you can use a font renderer like FreeType that produces proper anti-aliased output.

[Nitrogen]

Solved that little problem by grayscaling the characters...

I must say, it works really nicely.

[Nitrogen]

I've added small font support, cleartype support and no texture size constraint, among other small changes. No changes to the file types yet...
New version is avaliable for download using the link above.

I've tested it with Tahoma 8pt and I think those results are very good.

[LP]

This version appears to be greatly improved! Thanks for fixing stuff on such short notice!

Can you briefly explain the meaning of values inside XML file? By the way, shouldn't the XML file start with "?" before "xml" (sorry, this forum won't let me insert text, not even inside code tags!). Because currently it has a root node called "xml", which is somewhat misleading.

[IlovePascal]

Hey, I tried the 4.0 version (nt the recently updated one), and I found it weird how the preview (text at the bottom) doesn't work when the letters are too close together or when the shadows are largely offset or when the outline is too thick; well in short, everytime the letters would overlap a bit.
I end up with random letters instead of the text that I ask it to display.

The other thing is how all the characters don't fit in the image if you have too many of them, or if they're a bit too spaced out. Couldn't you just make the image larger?

I found the rest pretty kool and I'll definitely use it!
Cheers

[Traveler]

The other thing is how all the characters don't fit in the image if you have too many of them, or if they're a bit too spaced out. Couldn't you just make the image larger?

Unless I misunderstand, there's a texture size setting under the general settings tab. Just increase the slider to add more space.

[savage]

No, it's not the same format. If you can give me a technical document describing the layout/format of their XML, I could adapt mine to work.

I believe the format is fairly standard here is an example...

You can create custom typefaces by arranging a set of character images into a single bitmap, separating the areas between each letter with a pure magenta marker color:

From that ]This bitmap must include an alpha channel to specify which areas should be solid or transparent, and the alpha in the magenta border region must be set to fully opaque.[/quote]

What do you think?

[Nitrogen]

Well what about the XML file

I dont have XNA studio, but I managed to download a few xml font generators.. I'll adapt mine to fit it, since the xml I'm currently using is not very standardised.

[Nitrogen]

Hey, I tried the 4.0 version (nt the recently updated one), and I found it weird how the preview (text at the bottom) doesn't work when the letters are too close together or when the shadows are largely offset or when the outline is too thick; well in short, everytime the letters would overlap a bit.
I end up with random letters instead of the text that I ask it to display.

Yea it does assume you know what you doing
It'll tell you when there is not enough space for the characters to fit, and then there will be invalid characters because it starts dumping the excess characters at 0x0. But it does give you a large red warning label, so you can just increase the texture size and carry on!