Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/greggman/font-utils

Some font utils I wrote to generate fonts for gamemaker
https://github.com/greggman/font-utils

deltarune fonts gamemaker gamemaker-studio-2

Last synced: 3 days ago
JSON representation

Some font utils I wrote to generate fonts for gamemaker

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
# Some font utils used in a gamemaker project



Note I'm dumping these here as a place to back them up.

If you find them useful good for you but don't expect

any support.



They will not work out of the box. In particular the fonts

used are not included.



# Gamemaker Issues



The problems with gamemaker and fonts



1. gamemaker requires all glyphs to be the same height.



   So a period (.) takes the same vertical space as the letter B



2. gamemaker doesn't understand that glyphs can be larger than their font size



   In other words you set a font size for 20 pixels but some glyphs might actually

   extend above the top of a 20 pixel tall area as well as below



The tools below, you give them a font-size (the size the render the glyphs),

a glyph-height (the size to make the box the glyph will be put inside),

and a y-offset (how many pixels down from the top of the box to start rendering)



There's an option passed in, error-on-crop, that basically makes the generator

fail if any glyph extends out of the box. Looking at the error messages you can

tell if you need more space above (in which case make y-offset bigger) or more

space below (in which case make glyph-height bigger). Of course whenever you

make y-offset bigger you move all the glyphs down in their box so you probably

have to make glyph-height bigger on those cases.



The only other thing I think is not clear maybe is font-index. Some .ttf files have

multiple fonts inside. Here they are references by index. If you double click a .ttf

file a viewer will come up and you can prev/next to see the fonts and figure out

the index.



# prerequisites



* Windows 10 (otherwise you need to build font-altas-generator-freetype2)

* Install node.js from https://nodejs.org

* setup your folders like this



        +-somefolder

          +-fonts (contents of fonts.zip)

          +-build-new/yourproject (gamemaker project)



* open a node command prompt (or some command prompt with node.js in your path)



        cd fonts/gen-font

        npm install

        cd ../fonts/make-fonts

        npm install



# To generate the fonts



        cd fonts

        node make-fonts/make-fonts.js



  If you only want to generate some fonts you can add --font=substr as in



        node make-fonts/make-fonts.js --font=tiny



  which will only generate fonts with the word "tiny" in them



# make-fonts/make-fonts.js



  This is effectively just a batch file but using JavaScript so I can filter etc.

  It calls `node ../gen-font/gen-font.js



  If you look inside you'll see settings for each font. Example



        {

          fontName: "Name of Font",

          font: "Fonts-for-Gregg/Name Of Font.ttf",

          glyphHeight: 14,

          fontSize: 10,

          yOffset: 1,

          light: true,

          alphaMin: 10,

          alphaMax: 144,

          debugColor: "0x0000FF",

          outputName: "fnt_ja_small",

        },



  Most of the options are passed to gen-font.js an so are more documented there



# gen-font/gen-font.js



  This calls the font generator, read the output and copies the results into

  the gamemaker folders.



# font-atlas-generator-freetype2



  This is a C/C++ app that uses FreeType2 (a font library) to try to generate a font.

  It saves out a .png file and a .json file with data about the glphys it wrote.