Bitmap Font Generator C Header

#ifndef BITMAP // ^^ May cause problems in C As this is reserved for the implementation in C. Also the term BITMAP is very generic and you are very likely to clash with other libraries try and make it more unique to your project. You are assuming that a char is 8 bits. #define BIT (8.sizeof(byte)). Bitmaps that are 1, 4, or 8 bpp must have a color table with a maximum size based on the bpp. The maximum size for 1, 4, and 8 bpp bitmaps is 2 to the power of the bpp. Thus, a 1 bpp bitmap has a maximum of two colors, the 4 bpp bitmap has a maximum of 16 colors, and the 8 bpp bitmap has a maximum of 256 colors. Choose a Font Generation program that produces Fonts in the format used by your library. Or just say which library / format you are using. Someone will post an 8-pixel and a 10-pixel Arial Font for you. In fact, I would expect your library to provide at least one Font by default.

Anyway, turns out that I had missed a trick in fontforge, I couldn't get it to export bitmap data before, but that is because you need to go to Element-Bitmap strikes available before it will export bitmap data. Then you can select Generate Fonts and export BDF as olikraus said, which is perfect for the job, as it exports a hex dump of the font. Put text on a bitmap, make your winform app go full-screen, and say hello to some simple LINQ code. Download Graphics3 - 86.07 KB; Introduction.

Posted: 17 Mar 2015 at 00:08 by Codehead

One of the big problems OpenGL runs into after you’ve got your first few polygons flying around the screen is the lack of a standard method for generating text within the API.

A few techniques have evolved to tackle the problem:

Pre-generated string textures

The simplest and fastest method, a texture is pre-built for each piece of text that needs to be displayed. This is quick to render at run time, but isn’t very flexible or efficient.

Polygon glyphs created from outline font definitions

This method produces high quality, scalable text, but this is also the slowest approach due to the overhead of generating and rendering the glyph polygons.

WGL and GLUT extensions

These extensions do a great job of text rendering. However, these libraries are not universally available on all systems and I have a bad habit of trying to be portable and platform independent.

Bitmapped fonts

Bitmap fonts are fast, flexible and platform independent. However, there are some limitations: Quality suffers when scaling up the texture and the number of possible characters in a font bitmap is limited. Extended or Unicode character sets with accents or non-latin symbols are not well supported.

A bitmapped font is simply an atlas texture containing a collection of glyphs and symbols. (Note: the purple lines are a visual aid, they do not appear on the actual texture.)

The grid layout means that the calculation required to select any given character is quick and simple.

The area containing the selected characters can then be mapped onto a series of polygons to create dynamic strings of text.

Adding width information to the glyphs allows the textured quads to be overlapped to create better looking text with variable character widths.

There are quite a few bitmap font generators around, but I couldn’t find one that provided all the features I wanted. So I wrote my own.