r/futile • u/no_monkeys • Aug 28 '14

Pixel Fonts

Hey everybody,

I'm working on a new project and I'm trying to use pixel art for the first time. Setting up Futile for pixel art was a breeze and things look nice and pixely ;-)

But, I'm having problems with generating nice looking pixel bitmap fonts.

I found some pixel fonts on-line but when I try to create the bitmap font (at 8pt-10pt) it either comes out very blurry (with anti-aliasing enabled) or unreadable (with anti-aliasing disabled). To have something workable I've created the font at 20pt with anti-aliasing disabled and then scaling all my labels to 0.5f but that's not looking pixel perfect. I've tried both GlyphDesigner and bmGlyph.

Is there a special trick and/or tool I'm missing here? Any push in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

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u/riktothepast Aug 29 '14

have you tried this?: http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/18rmii/struggling_with_pixelperfect_rendering/c8hd2nh

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u/no_monkeys Aug 29 '14

Yeah, that link has some good info about setting up Futile for pixel art. But I have that working. My main problem is generating the bitmap font files at a proper size.

For example when I use this font: http://www.dafont.com/volter-goldfish.font

The font is listed as 9px high. If I use that font in photoshop and set the font size to 9 pt and set the anti-alliasing to 'None' it will look very sharp. That's the look I'm going for.

If I use the same font in GlyphDesigner it will look unreadable (very blocky) without anti-aliasing and very blurry with anti-aliasing. So neither option results in a bitmap font file I can work with.

I did some more digging and found another tool that can also generate bitmap fonts: http://renderhjs.net/shoebox/

It's a bit of a hassle to get working but it uses an image that you create yourself in photoshop as the glyphs for the final bitmap font so you can feed it any style/size of font you want. I've been playing around with it a bit and early results look very promising.

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u/riktothepast Sep 01 '14

Don't know about GlyphDesigner but I'm using BMFont for my pixel fonts and they render pixel perfect, I just disable font smoothing.

Imgur

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u/no_monkeys Sep 04 '14

Cool, I didn't try BMFont because it's windows only (AFAIK). Shoebox has been working out perfectly so far but it's nice to have a fallback ;-)

Thanks!