Author Topic: Is there a standard tool for making new fonts for libtcod?  (Read 7156 times)

drako0812

  • Newcomer
  • Posts: 2
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Email
Is there a standard tool for making new fonts for libtcod?
« on: October 21, 2013, 05:18:00 AM »
I've recently discovered libtcod and have started diving into the tutorials.  I've also looked at some of the documentation and the samples, and it appears you can create new fonts to use with libtcod as well as having several fonts that come with it.  The problem is finding an easy way to take a .ttf or .otf font file and creating a bitmap font from it.  I suppose I could write a tool using allegro5 or SFML, but it would take a while.  I tried experimenting with AngelCode's BmFont tool but it destroys the monospaced-ness of monospace fonts. I was just wondering if there was some community-made tool or something that I'm missing. The main reason I want to do this is to have many unicode characters available for creating unique tiles/icons. Also it would allow better future internationalization.

Also, as an aside, here are the names (yes, just names for now) of some of the game ideas I have in the works:
  • ÜBERverse - A Sci-Fi RPG with both character and ship gameplay
  • Steam Rising - A Steam-Punkish RPG but with traditional RPG races (mostly) and many (I think it was over 40) classes.
  • Dragon Seasons Series - A Series of RPGs spanning different ages of the game's world a little more D&D-esque than Steam Rising
     
    • Dragon Spring
    • Dragon Summer
    • Dragon Fall - The primary timeline
    • Dragon Winter
    • Dragon Rebirth

george

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 201
  • Karma: +1/-1
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: Is there a standard tool for making new fonts for libtcod?
« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2013, 03:34:50 PM »
What other tools have you tried? Maybe FontForge? Alphabix?

Z

  • Rogueliker
  • ***
  • Posts: 905
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Z's Roguelike Stuff
Re: Is there a standard tool for making new fonts for libtcod?
« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2013, 05:20:49 PM »
The thing I have done to create fonts for NotEye (which you could try as an alternative to Libtcod, BTW) is: write a program which creates a text file with all the characters arranged in the correct way, view it in an editor using the intended font, take a screenshot, and crop it.

drako0812

  • Newcomer
  • Posts: 2
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: Is there a standard tool for making new fonts for libtcod?
« Reply #3 on: October 22, 2013, 02:27:53 AM »
I haven't tried anything else yet because I didn't really know what else existed. I've seen something about FontForge before so I think I'll check it out, and while I'm at it I'll see about Alphabix and NotEye.  Thanks for the help.

- EDIT -

Well, it looks like FontForge might be more than what I need at this time, but it will probably be useful in the future.  I did some more looking and I found something called Codehead's Bitmap Font Generator. It looks like it will do everything I need.
« Last Edit: October 22, 2013, 02:46:47 AM by drako0812 »