Updated 10Jun2015: Code is now available on GitHub, anyupdates can be found there

Bitmap Font Editor
Bitmap Font Creator

While writing some bitmap font processing for an OpenGL project,I settled on using AngelCode's BMFont utility to generateboth the textures and the font definition. However, this means Ithen needed to write a parser in order to use this in my OpenGLsolution.

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. Select a font from among those installed on your system. This is also where you will set the size (in pixels) of the font, and can make it bold or italic. Create your character set You can 'paint-in' the characters you want to be included in your font. It is a good idea to select only the characters you really need to have in your bitmap font. Create your own custom bitmap font with all the glyphs you need Click on the Export button And select Export Type.xml (BMFont XML).

This library is a generic parser for the BMFont format - itdoesn't include any rendering functionality or exotic referencesand should be usable in any version of .NET from 2.0 upwards.BMFont can generate fonts in three formats - binary, text andXML. The library currently supports text and XML, I may addbinary support at another time; but currently I'm happy usingthe text format.

Note: This library only provides parsing functionality forloading BMFont data. It is up to you to provide functionalityused to load textures and render characters

There are four main classes used to describe a font:

BitmapFont - the main class representing the font and itsattributes
Character - representing a single character
Kerning - represents the kerning between a pair ofcharacters
Page - represents a texture page

There is also a support class, Padding, as I didn't want toreference System.Windows.Forms in order to use its own andusing a Rectangle instead would be confusing. You can replacewith this System.Windows.Forms version if you want.

Blackweb gaming mouse and keyboard. Finally, the BitmapFontLoader class is a static class thatwill handle the loading of your fonts.

Loading a font

To load a font, call BitmapFontLoader.LoadFontFromFile. Thiswill attempt to auto detect the file type and load a font.Alternatively, if you already know the file type in advance,then call the variations BitmapFontLoader.LoadFontFromTextFileor BitmapFontLoader.LoadFontFromXmlFile.

Each of these functions returns a new BitmapFont object onsuccess.

The BitmapFont class returns all the information specified inthe font file, such as the attributes used to create the font.Most of these not directly used and are there only for if yourapplication needs to know how the font was generated (forexample if the textures are packed or not). The main things youwould be interested in are:

Characters - this property contains all the charactersdefined in the font.
Kernings - this property contains all kerning definitions.However, mostly you should use the GetKerning method to getthe kerning for a pair of characters.
Pages -this property contains the filenames of the texturesused by the font. You'll need to manually load the relevanttextures.
LineHeight - this property returns the line height. Whenrending text across multiple lines, use this property forincrementing the vertical coordinate - don't just use thelargest character height or you'll end up with inconsistentline heights.

The Character class describes a single character. Yourrendering functionality will probably need to use all of theproperties it contains:

Bounds - the location and size of the character in thesource texture.
TexturePage - the index of the page containing the sourcetexture.
Offset - an offset to use when rendering the character so itlines up correctly with other characters.
XAdvance - the value to increment the horizontal coordinateby. Don't forgot to combine this value with the result of acall to GetKerning.

Example rendering using GDI

The sample project which accompanies this article shows a verybasic way of rending using GDI; however this is just fordemonstration purposes and you should probably come up withsomething more efficient in a real application!

The Bitmap Font Viewer application

Also included in the download for this article is a simpleWindows Forms application for viewing a bitmap font.

Note: All of the fonts I have created and tested wereunpacked. The font viewer does not support packed textures,and while it will still load the font, it will not draw glyphsproperly as it isn't able to do any of the magic with channelsthat the packed texture requires. In addition, as .NET doesn'tsupport the TGA format by default, neither does this sampleproject.

Unlike my other articles, I haven't really gone into the sourcecode or pointed out how it works, however it should all besimple to understand and use (despite having virtually nodocumentation) - please let me know if you think otherwise!

As mentioned above, I'm currently not using packed textures. Thefont parser will give you all the information you need regardingchannels for extracting the information, but could probably benicer done, such as using enums instead of magic ints - I mayaddress this in a future update, along side implementing thebinary file format.

Ideally the best way to use this code would be to inherit orextend the BitmapFont class. Therefore it would probably bebetter directly embedding the source code into your application,change the namespaces to match your own solution, then buildfrom there.

I haven't tested with many fancy fonts - it's probable that theMeasureFont method doesn't handle cases of fonts with have alarger draw area than their basic box size.

Updates to this project will be posted to either CodePlex orGitHub - this article will be updated once the code is up.

Update History

2012-01-02 - First published
2015-06-10 - Added GitHub links
2020-11-21 - Updated formatting

Filename	Description	Version	Release Date
BitmapFontParser.zip md5: 9897dbfb0eb6346f09d88a50f9687e2e	Source code for a parser for AngelCode BMFont text and XML font formats.	02/01/2012	Download

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Pixel fonts, also known as screen fonts or bitmap fonts, are fonts consisting of small pixels. Pixel fonts display the texts in simple blocks instead of elaborate curves as most regular fonts do. So the obvious advantage of pixel fonts over regular fonts is that texts using pixel fonts can still look crisp and clear in very small sizes. Pixel fonts are very popular over the Internet due to its clearness and crisp look, especially in websites that require text legibility in small sizes such as flash websites.

Because pixel fonts are usually designed to fit pixel by pixel with the computer screen, it will be best displayed at a specified size. Thyme Nu created by Michel Troy is a typical font family of pixel style. The family contains six fonts, and they are perfect for both small screen resolutions

Bitmap Font Generator Xml