Bitmap fonts are a great way to customize your novel's look and feel, but they can be quite tedious to produce manually.

Like most bitmap font creators, it is of course graphics API independent because it simply exports an image (and an easy to read data structure). However, implementing your own text-rendering system, in OpenGL or Direct3D, is not too difficult-render a quad for each letter and apply the bitmap font texture with appropriate coordinates. Bitmap font generator This program will allow you to generate bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts. The application generates both image files and character descriptions that can be read by a game for easy rendering of fonts. Photo to Text Converter, as the name give you a hint, is an online tool or program, using the help of online OCR technique we make it possible to extract text from the images. A free online Optical Character Recognition software translates the characters in a picture into electronically designated characters. Like most bitmap font creators, it is of course graphics API independent because it simply exports an image (and an easy to read data structure). However, implementing your own text-rendering system, in OpenGL or Direct3D, is not too difficult-render a quad for each letter and apply the bitmap font texture with appropriate coordinates.

Luckily there is a very good tool that makes it fast and easy and it's called Bitmap Font Generator, by Andreas Jönsson (www.AngelCode.com). The tool can generate a bitmap font in a format that Novelty is capable of importing.

Littera — Bitmap Font Generator

BFG is included with Novelty, but if you want to get the latest version, read tutorials or just pay tribute to the developer you can visit the official site.

Using the Bitmap Font Generator

BFG is very easy to use. You select a font that's on your computer and tweak the settings to fit your needs. In the case of unicode fonts you can pick which languages to include. The tool then generates the font as one or more texture-files and an FNT-file. The FTN-file holds all the information Novelty needs to find the characters in the textures.

Click Options->Font settings or press F to pick a font.

Most of the settings in this dialog are self-explanatory. If you want your font to include letters and signs from non-latin languages make sure to set the Charset to Unicode.

If you click Options->Expert options or press T you get treated to even more settings.

There are a couple of things here that you need to consider:
First and foremost you need to make sure that the Font descriptor is set to XML, as it's the only format that Novelty can interpret. You also need to make sure that the Bit depth is set to 32 or else your font won't have any transparency.

As for the texture size it depends on the size of the font. If the font can't fit within a texture, additional texture files will be generated. 512x512 is the recommended size.

To preview the font texture(s), click Options->Visualize
When you're happy with how it looks, save your font.

Once you've generated the texture(s) and FNT-file, you chould bring up Novelty. In the File-menu, select Import assets->Bitmap fonts...

See Full List On Angelcode.com

This will bring up the bitmap font import wizard. Click Load font... and navigate to the FNT-file you just generated. Once that's done, you have the option to change the name and add a filter. Then click Import. This will copy the font XML and the texture(s) to Novelty's asset library.

That's it. You should be ready to go. If you want, you can also save it as a package. The font will then be compressed to a single file that can be easily shared with friends.

LCD Assistant
LCD Assistant is a free tool for converting monochromatic bitmaps to data arrays for easy use with programs for embedded systems with microcontrollers and graphics monochromatic LCD displays like a T6963C, KS0108, SED1335 etc. Program create files for use with any C compiler : for AVR, ARM, PIC, 8051 and ohter microcontrollers. You can use directly with Arduino, mbed and any other design environment based on C compiler. If you use graphic LCDs and you want to display pictures, this program is for You! You can draw image in you best graphic editor and save it in *.bmp file.

Image And Text Scaling - Phaser 2

To convert image from bitmap file (or other standard graphics file format) to data array select from File menu command 'Load image'. Next, select byte orientation (for example : vertical for KS0108, SED1520, SPLC0501C etc; horizontal for : T6963C, SED1335 etc). If in data array must be image size (width and height) select 'Include size' checkbox and specify endianness of size (for example: Little endian for AVR; Big endian for ST7). Size are placed in two 16-bit variables at the begin of data array. Next, specify pixels/byte parameter. If display can support miscellaneous font size (displays with T6963C controller) image can be converted to array of bytes with specified amount of pixels in each byte. At last select from 'File' menu command 'Save output'. Data array will be saved in specified file. Next, just include this file into project and use array name as parameter for function that displays bitmap on LCD. If you have trouble with use generating file, or program will generate wrong files please let me know.