Font Builder
Usage
- Choose a primary font, which will be used for as much as
it can be used for.
- Optionally, choose a different secondary font which is used
when the primary font is missing certain characters - for example,
Trebuchet doesn't include any Greek/Cyrillic/Hebrew characters, so
these will be taken from Arial Unicode MS (by default) instead.
- Use the Preview font button to see what the font looks like
by rendering the contents of the textbox. Adjust the font settings
until perfection is attained.
- Choose a desired character list - a text file containing
all the characters that must be in the final font. The standard files
are latin.txt (containing ASCII plus some accented characters,
mainly useful for non-localised text) and standard.txt
(containing Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew characters, for text that
could be in any language).
- Click Generate texture, and select a name for the .fnt
file. A .tga texture will also be generated, in the same directory
with the same name. Depending on several random coincidences, the texture
generation might be very fast or might take quite a while. When it finishes, the
excitingly patterned texture will be displayed.
- Save your settings through the File menu so that you can
easily recreate the font later.
Unicode fonts
The font builder is intended to be used with Unicode characters.
Unfortunately, most fonts aren't. The font builder tries
to use Arial Unicode MS by default: this seems to
be installed by some versions of Microsoft Office, or can
be downloaded from locations such as
this (12MB
self-extracting 7-Zip). It's probably worth getting, since it
includes almost every Unicode glyph that you could wish for.
Another potentially useful Unicode font is Bitstream Cyberbit
(available from Netscape's FTP server,
6MB).
All fonts must be installed into Windows before you can use
them in the font builder.
Font settings
- Size - size of the font in arbitrary units.
- Boldness - if you don't have a proper bold variation of the
font, the boldness setting fakes it by drawing
the character several times.
- Italicness - if you don't have a proper italic variaton,
the italicness setting slants it in 5-degree increments. Negative
values slant the other way.
- Tracking - extra spacing in pixels added between every
non-zero-width glyph.
- Leading - extra spacing in pixels between lines of text.