FBA The Creator

Hi,

just wondered what techniques people used to create graphics fonts. Seems time consuming to create them by hand, I mean using photoshop etc as you have to set the first line to show how wide each character is. Is there a way to automate this process?

Ta.

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http://www.boiledsweets.com

I do it the tedious way. My plan was actually to do a bunch of them and then post on the forums so that other people could use them.

There is a slight chance that I may be able to write an online script to create the spacing line given the font image, but I don't know when I could even start it.

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Don't look at me. I'm new here.

Okay, so you should know that if I can think of a way to help solve a problem, I won't wait. In other words, the tool I said that I might be able to do eventually is done and online. The FBA The Creator GFX Font Spacing Creator will take a GIF or PNG file with your font in it and create a PNG with the white spacing line on top.

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Don't look at me. I'm new here.

Looks good but cannot save output file. Says "could not complete the operation due to error 800700de"

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http://www.boiledsweets.com

According to some Google research, it's a problem with IE7 that no one's been able to figure out. Clearing your browser's cache might work. Using a different browser is the only known workaround.

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Don't look at me. I'm new here.

Tired Firefox, allows me to download the image but it cannot be read in Photoshop or Fireworks. Says invalid format.

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http://www.boiledsweets.com

You are so very right. While I'm trying to figure that out, you should be able to copy and paste it into Photoshop straight from the browser.

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Don't look at me. I'm new here.

I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that I think I've figured out a way to make the images savable. The bad news is that I'm not going to do it. Since it's possible to copy the image into a graphics tool, I didn't want to deal with the headache of an almost total rewrite and an increased security risk.

I did change the instructions to point out that it needs to be copied (which both IE and FF can do).

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Don't look at me. I'm new here.

Ta, yeah I copied it and life is good again, however, the current trouble with gfx fonts is that FBA colours them, my fonts are like this...



I have requested an enhancement to the gfx font drawing function so that it doesn't colourise the font image. Yes I could load them as a regular image and just draw the bit I need but imagine a large font file with say 40+ characters in it, all different wdiths) would be time consuming to set up whereas the font gfx routines do the grunt work as they can use the mask line at the top. I think this would be a really powerful enhancement and I believe it's coming in the next release.

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http://www.boiledsweets.com

Here is the tool i use to get a quick bitmap font ready to use. It also create the map with character widths to binary or INI file

http://www.lmnopc.com/bitmapfontbuilder/

hope this helps

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Regards,

umbiomar
umbiomar@gmail.com