Bitmap-Fonts: add fontwriter link

[rotter]

You should definitely add fontwriter to the bitmap-fonts readme. Also possibly/probably integrate it into main libgdx tools. It works very well, much better than running weird programs that never work well such as Hiero (or some that are paid).

https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx.github.io/edit/dev/wiki/graphics/2d/fonts/bitmap-fonts.md

Fontwriter: https://github.com/tommyettinger/fontwriter

[Frosty-J]

Does that require TextraTypist? The wiki generally doesn't cover tools for third-party libraries.

[rotter]

Does that require TextraTypist? The wiki generally doesn't cover tools for third-party libraries.

No, this tool generates PNG + DAT files that can be loaded into a BitmapFont without any extra libraries (I dont use TextraTypist). I'm not sure the details, I think @tommyettinger can explain it better

[tommyettinger]

It still needs an extra library to load into plain BitmapFont; that would be BitmapFontBridge. That said, that's a tiny library and you can copy the code if you'd rather. TextraTypist can load .dat files produced by FontWriter, though it currently prefers the smaller .json.lzma files, using nearly the same code as BitmapFontBridge. I'm guessing @rotter is using the few files from either BitmapFontBridge or TextraTypist copied over, which is a perfectly cromulent way to do this.

I currently use AngelCode BMFont, which is unfortunately Windows-only, to generate any "retro fonts" where pixels are visible, and use FontWriter for anything else. Hiero doesn't work on a current Mac machine now, as far as I can tell, and BMFont needs some kind of emulation. FontWriter at least seems to work on Mac as of the latest release, though it's a command-line app and downloading one of those is somewhat miserable to do on a Mac. I can't vouch for it working on Linux, but I will try to get it working quickly if it doesn't at this point.

Hiero has gotten metrics subtly wrong essentially every time for me. I can't remember a time it's actually made a .fnt that worked out of the box as I wanted it. FontWriter is a thin wrapper around msdf-atlas-gen, which produces JSON files as an output option, and somehow seems to get metrics correct much more often on the first try. It also supports MSDF fonts, which Hiero doesn't, SDF fonts, which Hiero does (but it likes to freeze the UI while you're making one), and of course normal fonts with no distance field effect. FontWriter also generates a preview of the font using TextraTypist, and optimizes files using oxipng.

[rotter]

I use maybe an old version of BitmapFontBridge, it was called BitmapFontSupport :

BitmapFont fontMain = BitmapFontSupport.loadStructuredJson(Gdx.files.internal("fonts/myfont.dat"), "myfont.png");